BPR 53 | 2026
When she is away, I enter her room, sit on the
window seat, and look at the new tree stump.
I draw the stump, stipple in the bark before she
comes home and disappears again. The neighbor
and his daughter stand in front of the stump and cry.
I can’t see her face. I could sketch it, but I’ve stopped
sketching things I can’t see. The girl might later
remember the tree as larger than it was, larger than
three-and-a-half school buses. I never looked at the
tree until the week before its death. I rush to look
at the stump, write about the stump before my
feelings vanish. Charles Wright wrote, The urge
toward form is the urge toward God. But I think that
the urge toward form is the urge away from God.
Images of my daughter are clear because she is hardly
here. Her room takes her form when she is missing.
I don’t tell anyone that sometimes I love her more in
my mind. I love so many ghosts in this house, that I
begin to think love and death are the same. That my
love for everyone else only has a form without its body.
forthcoming from Tree of Knowledge, FSG, 2026