The Last Tree

Told of it many times over, he had them take him there. And when they left, he then, to hear it himself, pressed his good ear against the bark of that fabled tree. Later he’d pull others aside and tell it himself: a sound burning through the proof of souls, perhaps; a splintered echo like the shattered formula of glass; a hissing of fallacies that derive music from ash and ash from openings in bird-song; and then here and there a vacant whistle; and then another noise, only this time closer to the unfinished voice of a girl, her hair almost certainly wrapped in a myth of the times, her body covered in nothing but oils and rags of a torch dropped through the centuries, her eyes lit like fields on fire, in which are rooted this very tree and a man like himself beside it, listening to the sky blacken as if it were the inside of God’s throat.