It is enough for me to close my eyes, to wipe the boa constrictor image of the branches, and to open them again a moment later, on the other side of the crown, the one that is intertwined with the absolute blue of the sky. Through my mouth I am sipping the freedom with which you have sovereignly chosen to support the endless sky. It smells like fine spirits. My nostrils are fretting as if I were in front of an unknown hazard and I make another attempt to understand why it is so hard for people to decode your language, when all you need to talk is light, it is enough for you to show your own image, your sense and speech, your voice to the children of the earth.

Look, my hand is drawing another smile for you, which coincides with the hazard line in which your lively cells have been united and your green eternity built, like a monumental elegy of the Cosmos. And I am not allowed to make mistakes. If one single breeze made my hand tremble, I would distort the meaning of the vegetal element, the meaning of your voice which we are all made of, and time would cease to exist. Your leaves would no longer turn yellow and fall. In spring you would no longer burst into buds, and my son would no longer be born. The cycle of renewal would cease, the rain drops, petrified between sky and earth, would undo themselves into unseen atoms and would cover your eternal colossal image of pure green. Our ephemeral life of plastic and smoke would transform the miracle of the divine kiss from which you were born into a curse. The chlorophyll would turn into trinitrotoluene.

Yet now your voice is drawing the kiss on my own mouth, in a vegetal language. It makes me listen to it with my lips, my skin, my bones that become fluid, translucent.

With my epidermis, my hair, my fingernails does it make me listen to it. And it passes through me like a warmly soughing boat. The one who is steering it is me, the green-eyed captain. Therefore my arms are embracing you, they are going deep down among your branches, caressing your hair of leaves, therefore my mouth is full of unidentified aromas, trying to sip your breath so as to survive the age of plastic and smoke.

And, God be praised, the two of us, man and tree, are trembling like the moon on water, our bodies stuck to each other, and in our kiss I feel one single saliva and one single taste of ripened fruit. It means we are alive. Still.

We are both at a crossing of ages. And, I don’t know where from, a Japanese honeysuckle perfume is pouring over.

Text : Val Mănescu ; Translation : Elena Ciobanu