Letter to a god.
(This is a sort-of response to something a friend wrote. It’s not critical to know the original piece.)
Janus,
Two-faced, you speak looking up, bury a box looking down. Green exhumed upright dead old man gazes straight ahead, holding your gaze up and away from the inside of his burying box. You never see him down looking up, unless you take the whole frame and turn it sideways.
Horizontality is decay. Unused muscles, skin, bones decay. Upright existence requires integrity of body, so isn’t frightening to look at. But this here is death made vertical: and so, since decay is not an option, apply color. Green, like a tree. Brown roots underground; above-ground—green. Trees with their double-liminal, ambiliminal existence remind you of the dead; this frightens you, so you teach schoolchildren of the life trees bring.
Lest we forget that green death is all around us, grass grows where trees don’t. Liminal death’s reminder, a low dense green fog toeing the line between above and below.
We’re frightened, so we reaffirm the line. Asphalt is hard fastening the gap between us and deathl; we look down and see no green. We are supported—but stifled, deprived of oxygen in our self-imposed separation from death. Soles become burned and numb and tough like leather.
Until an earthquake, or time, or tree roots, break the asphalt, and the dead surface. Subliminal roots revolt, become superliminal, obvious. Only part pokes out, tangling the spiderweb-thin sticky divide between now and never again. Once tangled, there’s no returning to order, never a full separation. Re-asphalting will only repeat the cycle. Roots like crooked fingers tear at the blockage of memory
and feed the green death’s reminder that makes poison into life for us.