the grove

Ten thousand one hundred and fifty five toying with symmetry and robbing us blind taking bank notes and scribbling amounts on the blank notes, buying up the stones

Three hundred of them came back and looked for more finding a place deserted with old newspapers and ugly signs cracked and falling exposed wires all the doors open wind blowing across open streets crowded with obstacles

They found the place a right home and they cleared the sidewalks and the intersections and blasted holes in walls to create new paths and threw bathtubs over balconies and and flooded all the underground places. Theirs was a new school of urban planning and they built neither out nor up but carefully placed destruction in all the right places until the empty city was teeming with life. Fish stocked the basements, swimming up old stairwells and making jumps into the street like eggs hopping into frying pans, while Ivy covered the walls where they found the new paths appealing, exploring the blasted terrain and bringing meaning to its imperfection.

This place was like a grown over zoo where old cage bars became savagely green propping up oaks and allowing the ivy to get close to the sun. Raw green foliage ruled over the quiet and even the animals were hiding, no longer half as visible as they had been, when the zoo was operating and meeting its daily, weekly, yearly objectives, pressures unwittingly placed on ignorant actors who already couldn’t handle the stress. You can’t blame them. They all had stage fright.

Here, a tiger slinks through an old hallway. The way she moves is not confident or cocksure, but it is determined. To prowl is to live, like a shark keeping swimming to keep its gills sated, when her shoulders are hunched and she moves along quickly in silence, she’s a fish in a stream, where she belongs, and finally, finally breathing. She spent breathless years sheated in ugly bars. She retreats from sight.

Our humble 300 have retreated to the village grove, where 900 trees that nobody planted sprouted through the asphalt and grew taller than ladders in less than a year. The trees have grown pregnant with flowers and figs, hard copper wires sticking out between their branches like tinsel, loose twigs of bark and metal falling 25 feet to the hard, cracked ground, where they can land with a snap or they can land with a kling, depending on which way they happened to fall.

The people must now stay in the grove most of the time. The world they helped create has now grown too wild. They showed it a path and it crowded them out with guaranteed danger, and even now, they are still too human to be able to live in guaranteed danger. Yet every day, at the height of midday, when it is too bright to feel scared, they’ll leave the figs, explore the city, and continue their work. Their grove is a heart, and it lies at the center of a body long deprived of oxygen. Everyday, the midday sun is a single beat of the long dormant heart, sending 300 blood cells deeper and deeper down dormant blood vessels, awakening old flesh, ennervating it, pressing it gently and making it move. Blasting holes in walls. Removing doors from hinges. Listening quietly until they hear the changes that they are supposed to make.

They stay late, late, until it looks like it will be dark by the time they make it back to their place of rest, and then they rush as quickly as they can, without making noise, speeding along the clearest avenues left, those well-trod veins with cleared intersections. They race the dusk, and they know if they are too slow, there may be monsters lurking. But, if it grows dark, when they near the grove, the fire will already be lit by those who stayed behind, the eternal flame, lit by an old shard of magnifying glass held over dry leaves until they smoke over and finally burst into self-sustaining heat.