Hawthorn

I collected the twigs not long after she fell, sometime after the big storm last Spring. It seemed the least I could do. I wrapped them in tin foil, and tended them through their journey in the flames one long evening that May. It must have been May, the swallows were watching me from the wire, and the blackbirds were loud and last to bed. I don’t draw much in charcoal, and I’m unsure how to start. I cast around the studio and settle on a tiny oak panel that I layered with gesso, in time honoured technique, some weeks ago. The gesso is smooth and cool. Wood, crushed stone, and animal glue, once the preserve of altarpieces. I choose some of her charcoaled twigs. Blackened fragments of once living limbs. Every cell fossilised by fire and carrying the memories of a tree whose branches once held the feet of turtle doves; whose fibres thrilled to the rasp of the nightjar; whose tender shoots were nibbled by deer and coppiced by woodlanders; whose trunk shook to the ringing of the axe and the rasp of the saw. I break them into the mortar and grind them carefully to powder. I make a pile of the pigment, use my finger to create a well in the centre, pour in walnut oil, about a teaspoon full, take the glass muller from the shelf and gradually effect the magical change from powder to paint. I take a cloth and smooth the paint over the gesso, which accepts it willingly. I take a little bottle of turpentine, itself made from trees, dip in the end of the rag, and start, carefully, to remove the charcoal in the shape of the tree it is from. And I am left with bones. Tree bones. An echo and an absence of the life that the charcoal once held. An opposite of the blackened twig that lies crumbled in my hands. I have drawn a future ghost. When I am done my hands are covered in the owl black blood of this tree. It is rubbed in my eyes and smeared across my scalp. It is settled in my lungs and scorched in my mind. We have come through the flames and the shadows of the night, this tree and I, and in the dark, messy materiality of the studio our edges have softened, boundaries have blurred. It is a caress, an intimate touch, and just for a little while, I am part human, part tree.