The X-Rays

by Joan Aleshire

They look like photographs of trees,

except that the terms were reversed –

black for the background, white

for the object itself.  And light

shone through the white, making it

insubstantial, subject to change –

but that was my vision, my hope.

There was a smell of hot metal, the charge

of early interventions, and I had to lay

each arm flat on a glossy black plate

that reflected the past and future

with their endless questions.  Not to

move, not even to breathe, to act only

as object, so the kindly men, friends

of my father, could hold the film

against the light, admiring the clarity

of their work, admitting the mystery.

No one said tree to me, but I saw

the photographs of dancers and the apple tress

they mimicked in “Appalachian Spring,”

curved and twisting; and the cypresses

pressed by wind that Weston took at Point Reyes.

Deformed was the description, and I agreed

since it was simplest to, though that means

unnatural.  Tress respond, in the thick joint,

the gnarl, the odd turn, to some force, some

weather.  What after all is form

but the giving in, the inch-by-inch bend,

and then the resistance?