On Pinegroves And The Damage I Have Dealt

Bruno Hettman

I shouldn’t be here right now.

I never got permission from the pines to trample their roots, nor did the dying swallowtail by my feet tell me it was okay to photograph its final moments. Regardless, I sit here in spite of my destructive nature, Cemented in a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the chain pulled taught between myself and “human innovation.”

My frame is not steel and glass but marrow and light, I whisper to myself. My skin is not cellophane but something that breathes. My voice is not the hum of machinery but of swarms of cicadas. The buzzing of their wings is growing desperate now like an orchestra painfully aware that their weathered strings may not be strong enough to last another sonata and I can no longer tell over their cacophony whether this is a) a confession, tear-soaked and abandoned at the foot of a crumbling altar, b) a repentance, forged in an angry haste and still hot to the touch, or c) a prayer, written only halfway before left to decay beneath a white wooden cross on the side of a highway.

I don’t think what it is will fix the fruitlessness of its failing affirmations, Nor will composition of frame or skin change the fact that the pine my frame rests against will one day wrap its roots around my feeble excuse for a skeleton and overtake it. No matter what my skin is made out of I cannot change that it is thin and fragile and moments from decomposition.

I cannot change that the low, defeated hum of my cicada voice has never been heard through the commotion of the Everything, and never will be. As the pines above me weep, I fall beneath a spell of shame and melancholy and wonder whether I will ever know the warmth that a bed of pine needles knows, housed beneath a temple of wood and sun.

I should never have come looking for this temple. My gaze upon it is a thing of sacrilege. My stride becomes unholy with every step I take. I can only be sure of my breath in that it is not venomous like the rest of me.