Amal Joseph Mathew, Kerala, India
Everyday the bending bough of the palms, slanting their feeble shoulders to one another, without movement, breath or word, lively occupied the meager square inches of space, without complaint or modest remarks, they watched from the muted courtyard overlooking the narrow rocky pathway cutting into the buildings of windows, doors and thin walls. A few windows operated like tree-tops in this sense, as in if you were a Sparrow perching on the high end of a pine-tree, you’d see what you would from the windows, girls and boys below like points on a bell curve, scattered at the edges and opening under the center, resembling pointillist dots of fire, as in dotted or scattered onto a map or a painting of the sky. Everyday the bending bough of the palms, stood as arrow-heads, as close to each other as they could, as arrows would, inside the quiver of a hunter’s armory—that was how they wished to stay.
*
When God decided to breathe life into the first person, she wanted to create something to mirror the light eaters. The light eaters that filled the world as an attentive soft prayer, so she made the first person, not in her image, but in the after-light of a bending bough. She knelt beside an un-tucked fallow and caressed a maimed branch under the majestic face of the wounded Birch. The boughs signified attention while the first person signified will. “They should sleep as the angels in the rain, they should listen as the lakes and walk across the plains searching for the things that they saw in the darkness, they should answer to the light and the light alone, they should believe that they will remain forever, they should not make a world within this world or kneel down to imitate the sun. Let them pluck the firm moon and pull it towards their chests”, she commanded, as she sculpted the first person out of the broken antler.
*
A group of trees, wounded against the fire in a painting is called a landscape. I am ostensible and I desire to become a landscape at will, but I lack attention. I carry an axe, I know the names of the things in the night, the spaces between light and dark, I am told, this at default is called ‘gravity’. Each passing sliver that I remain kneeling under the snag, I am reminded of how the forking bough, grounded in a forced slanting fashion, is an upturned hip unlikely to open at my will. The tree is cold. I swing my axe, informing the bough of my God’s several creations. This was how I manifested God, a prayer listing holy objects, a prayer that truly lacked attention, a wisdom unlike the Birch, that does not kneel down to sustain the creator. I swing as a blind horse, who cannot tell the fire in a landscape, I swing, and that is the original sin.
*
The deaf recluse confuses the first sound she’s ever heard for the end of the world, a new light guides an arrow to the eye of the hanging bough.
Amal Mathew is an artist from India. His creative and critical pieces have appeared in the nether Quarterly, VAYAVYA, and LiveWire among other places.