John Biscello

The branch of the tree reaching down. It reaches down to graze the time-scarred headstone, to caress it. Could this be … a secret love story, a love story with no history, or with a cortege of history, spanning many timelines and lifespans? They have found each other again. The skinny mottled limb decked out in long green perforated leaves and bright pink flowers, an asking limb, a fornicate falling limb, needing to touch the stone memorializing the person who has passed from here to there, from now to now-again (or perhaps new-again, or never-again).  Let’s call it a love story, consensual, textured, tactile, unassigned, a love story ministered by the migrating wind and its featherbrush fingers. Or, perhaps, it is not the tree’s love for the spirit of one who has passed, but rather for the stone itself, love stories are hard to decipher, many existing as riddles crammed into glass bottles cast into the sea. If you notice, about a couple of feet away, there is a tiny tombstone, more than half of it concealed in the overgrown grass. The scale of the tombstone signifies that it’s the grave of a child. Does the child factor into this love story, this scene, this drama? Are we witnessing a mother, father, and child reunited? Perhaps it is the spirit of the child that has gone into the tree and is reaching down to hold and touch and reconnect with its mother, whose tombstone is the taller one. Again, many love stories remain unknown, inscrutable glyphs and sphinxes. Yet, no matter the configurations of the players, and their relationships (in this life, past lives, lives to come), they pulse in and out of time, shapeshifting to abide manifest desires.