I stare through plate glass with a painter's eye. <br />Horizon's treeline holds me rapt; <br />drawn to a small clearing between walls of trees: <br />focal point: a huge denuded oak with widespread skeletal branches. <br />It holds the center of the empty space, heart of the vanishing point. <br />& to its left & just behind stands a small cedar one-third its height <br />green & vital: an apt companion whose lush branches <br />contrast with oak's stark nakedness. <br /> <br />An artist might create a world more ideal <br />than that presented by picture window's frame: <br />Each side's tree line would carry the eye <br />inexorably to that single point, that naked tree <br />shivering in February's chilling winds. <br />In his rendition, strip mall in the foreground <br />would surrender to rolling hills of trees & shrubs; <br />highway become a winding path up the hill <br />all so the eye might hold its focus on central oak, <br />creating some idyllic scene, imaginal & Edenic... <br /> <br />My eye would choose to leave those jarring structures, <br />for both exist in eye's truth in the same frame. <br />It is their relation to one another that reveals secrets: <br />fractal branches spun by chaos, order's hidden tool <br />standing against man's harsh cold lines of concrete, glass & steel. <br />& what of smaller lives the picture can't reveal? <br />Distance denies each blade of grass, creating flowing fields <br />all trompe l'oeil, all illusion, seamless sea of verdancy <br />really millions of grasses & weeds & underbrush all living <br />against the harshness of straight lines and coldness, <br />softening edges with patches of green & crooked limbs. <br />For long after structures have crumbled to dust <br />nature will reclaim every brick & stone & shard of glass <br />with stone crushing roots & a fearsome embrace of viridian. <br /> <br />(Copyright 2/17/2006)<br /><br />Hugh Cobb<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/vanishing-point-2/
