How its slow branching made her bleed, O the cut of its bark.
She was impure and had to immerse herself, she had to submerge herself and her tree in the ocean, to water it, then, to scrub from it its bark dead like a skin — to shed, it’s said, the snake of her limb.
There was a hollow inside, and how despite that she’d complain of an emptiness…the form of its hurt, and not hurt itself. Hard to explain. How she couldn’t stand, and so she’d lie down in the grass; she couldn’t bend, couldn’t lean, only lie. That was difficult, too. When wet, the trunk would swell inside her, and so she’d throwup into a basin, now a river to island her garden — or, how she’d vomit into the sky according to some, vomiting the sky itself others hold, constellations of mouthstuff, acidic stars.
One night, she was flung high up to the air toward the sky, as the tree grew to height, took root deep in the earth down below her up high, cubits above in the treetop, atop sore and there swayed by the wind.
How do I get myself into these things?
And how out?
She found herself talking to the tree, her voice was the wind.
And then she slept, head on moss.
And then woke.
She stood emptied out on the sturdiest of her limbs that she’d slept on, atop the tree she’d just birthed, and gazing out over the lie of the land.
And its beasts.
There was a husband in the distance, too, years ahead, decades and menses — in his hands, he appeared to hold loaves.
This tree is our house — it’s more hers.
Of the tree grown down from within her with her on top of the tree grown down and then out of her up.
One morning, she began her descent: plucking the stem from her navel, from the highest of her tree’s branches the umbilicus bud, the soft, downy, prettypink petiole blooming in white, pricked and ripped — then slinking her shimmying way, down past boughs wet with her, in a pomaceous tumble soon splitting her legs and, trunkhugging, the tightening hug of such thighs…until she touched ground, a firm footing, arrived. An apple as if a breast of hers or another belly went loose with the rock and the shake — gravity fell is how, and the fruit hit her on the head, then hit the ground and rolled over the horizon, the sun. She gave a yell, he heard her yell, then turned his head to her and realized by this risen sun how late in the distance he was — that he had to arrive, must…he’ll be late soon enough.
Her tree grew down ever further, then, how it drunk down even lower to stay: it branched into the earth, roots to vein the beneath, seeking a wet other than hers, its very source that had seeded — down into the sidewalks, the breakyourback cracks, down into the asphalt, the now landscaped lawn of the garden.
Knots widened into plates, boughs wound into bowls.
Kinder, which were leaves fallen in the wind of her yell, ribbed in fall — they went out to retrieve them, the many plates and the bowls, and then to forage for more, with always an appetite climbed up, clambered down, scavenged their meat placesettings from the northernmost face, dairy scarfed from the south of her round.
As it’s been said, her tree was their house, and still is: this room here the lowest stump of the trunk, the diningroom, the room in which we all dine…it’d been hollowed out by the kinder, woodstuff taken to dust fluffed their pillows, which’re buds never to bloom, for night’s sleep within their rooms ringed of grain.
And from all that, from the root, the first and the strongest, the taproot it’s called — only this table remains.
The rest having been sided in plastic, roofed in who knows menschmade or synthetic what else.
A table of room hollowed out from around the table of root, that’s how it happened — we’re told.
But, the question the scholia still ask, a table tabling what — what comes cosmologically next, the penultimate celestial course piled on?
What’s to be served on the table — what savory dish, what sweet sacerdotal…what are we having, what’re we having, what’re we having, Hanna?
Ima, all your kinder want to know. Tonight.
