Susan M. Schultz

I and Eucalyptus

Text & Photography

2

After I said, “look at the tree,” a woman walking by termed it “magnificent.” Adjective as abstraction; it (neutral pronoun) is magnificent (blanket term). Tree covered in a multi-colored blanket of reds and greens and blacks and browns, but only where reading lenses meet distance. I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. This is not to say the tree is he or she or they, and thou seems an antiquated intimacy. If the relation is reciprocity then what does Eucalyptus get from me? Am I an it to it, who is not an It to me? I take photos of the tree, and note the verb. Appropriate is not appropriation, but something more decorous. In this decade I better know the self’s fragility as memory, self-contained upon a stage, a series of events to watch rather than to leap in like a river, seductive. You know you want to leap into what will destroy you, for you are American, so you focus on a tree behind you. Stolid, it doesn’t succumb to desire, though sometimes to wind, an uneven heating of the earth. Two eggs stand on the bottom of a bowl, a light shining down on them. Like two boxers before they dance. A brown egg kisses a white egg, and it’s not allegory.

Only the cops wore masks, not against covid, but against our attention. They are not You, though they might be. They are not It, though they acted as such. The tree navigates its colors as if there were meanings to its palette. Red is not anger, but a cap reflected. Green is not jealousy, but the grass around the tree. Brown is not mud, though the rain makes it appear so. Is rain the artist? Is wind? Am I, for taking the picture, downloading and fiddling with it? Is the picture then a Thou, related or unrelated to the tree? If a bot can tell a lie, can the eucalyptus? Or is your accident a form of truth that carries no ethical weight? My photograph becomes the tree’s memory. Yesterday there were streaks of sap; today there’s a gecko stuck in it; in three days, the gecko’s skeleton is held against the light, a jaw, a back, a tail entangled in the tar. The photographs are still, but it’s sequence that interests me, not the one-off, the beautiful image. Abstraction as dopamine trigger. It’s the silence between the shots (remove word from gun and give it to art) that gives us pause. Generous pause. What we don’t remember we see again as flat and new and still only as it sits on its canvas. I look at a tree photo, see two profiles of demons, one eye on each. Foreground demon has a mouth shaped like a Valentine’s heart. I and Eucalyptus exchange our vows, before dog and I turn to trudge through the nets of other shadowed trees. That was not in the photograph. 

19

There must be days Eucalyptus would slam the door and stay inside, like a scared child. Bark curtains half-cover portholes of lighter wood; three layers deep, it’s still surface. To take a photograph is to trust in surface; sometimes this takes time, returning to the same storefront year after year as its wooden structure yellows, pipes rust. Character is what gets shaken off, though we refer to our wrinkles as add-ons. The places that scare us, increasingly, exist outside, as if raw emotion manufactured guns in 3D. Print out your fears. Tree appears not to feel terror, though clearly it inhabits its losses, the narrow girdle of black bark strewn on the ground around it. Not self-loss, which we can manage, but loss by ax, by termination notice, by accident. Tree is self that becomes shelves, through no artistry of its own. But island Eucalyptus are too expensive to mill, just cheap enough to burn. There’s power in loss of self or shelf, a bulb burning late at night, gathering image in, then dropping it like a match.

The tree might have been the paper this will be printed on. That’s the place that scares Eucalyptus, or would me, this change of states from wood to word, from silence into a furnace mouth. Young people take photographs of each other on the tracks at Auschwitz. Picnics at Bull Run. Either we can’t foresee or we won't remember what ruins remind us of. Somewhere nearby a cardboard sign tells us we are in our last day, no hour. Don’t go to hell, it urges us in crude black marker. On the other side, $5 bbq. $5 painted a careful red, the event partially erased.

Eucalyptus and I stand on the lawn beside the swimming pool, I taking its picture, it refusing to pose. There is no posing in this world. Every You in the world is doomed by its nature to become a thing, the return trip always different from the voyage out. Save this ticket as proof of your journey. A small brown veined leaf slips inside a gap in the bark, held tight by black sap. Its sell by date comes sooner than ours. The men in sandwich boards can’t be far behind, announcing our close-out sale, including remnants.

 20

Farewell, Eucalyptus! Not as substance, but as idea. I want to gravitate toward fact, but my eco-meditations wander off with me in their thrall, sentences that stick to other sentences, sappy, insubordinate ones. The tree distinguishes between form and format, between hard wood and the soft pulp where words go when they leave my screen. Think of them as seeds, or screeds. The double ee’s leave trees for thoughts. More than ought, I think. Imagination turns us to a You, Buber says, but isn’t it It that we need to save? Is there a You after the coming storms, driven mad by climate change? Without It, there’s no You, or do You, too, ascend to heaven, Eucalyptus? Or stay as the gray wash of ash beside a new grave? Today, the dog and I found coffee cups in the cemetery. One had been purchased by Lisa, another bore only its kind, and the third read “thank you for composting me.” I’m glad the punchline came last; an out of order joke never ends well. The graves are about lines: grandfather, mother, sister, son. A baby named Cadance, etched white bear on her black stone. You too are composed of lines, sticky ones and straight ones, brown marks between sheets of black. White print on black costs more, I remember, and the pages tend to smudge. We find fake paper money sometimes, good only for burning. Transmission through ash and smoke, a white kite blown over the green wheeled incinerator. I’ve wanted to transmit something of you, Eucalyptus, but I fear the wandering is mostly mine. My camera proves we’ve come to know each other, but not what has been said between us. Saying is not surface. Surfaces suggest, but there’s no recording them as sound, except as insubstantial palm leaves like those outside my window. My friend tells me that “thinprose” is better than a mistake. Let this thinprose resemble the thintree, so nearly thing. The You we say to [them] sticks to the threshold of language which is sometimes black tar, sometimes brown sap. Threshed and held, this thin harvest.