Vanishing Point Poem by Hugh Cobb

I stare through plate glass with a painter's eye.
Horizon's treeline holds me rapt;
drawn to a small clearing between walls of trees:
focal point: a huge denuded oak with widespread skeletal branches.
It holds the center of the empty space, heart of the vanishing point.
& to its left & just behind stands a small cedar one-third its height
green & vital: an apt companion whose lush branches
contrast with oak's stark nakedness.

An artist might create a world more ideal
than that presented by picture window's frame:
Each side's tree line would carry the eye
inexorably to that single point, that naked tree
shivering in February's chilling winds.
In his rendition, strip mall in the foreground
would surrender to rolling hills of trees & shrubs;
highway become a winding path up the hill
all so the eye might hold its focus on central oak,
creating some idyllic scene, imaginal & Edenic...

My eye would choose to leave those jarring structures,
for both exist in eye's truth in the same frame.
It is their relation to one another that reveals secrets:
fractal branches spun by chaos, order's hidden tool
standing against man's harsh cold lines of concrete, glass & steel.
& what of smaller lives the picture can't reveal?
Distance denies each blade of grass, creating flowing fields
all trompe l'oeil, all illusion, seamless sea of verdancy
really millions of grasses & weeds & underbrush all living
against the harshness of straight lines and coldness,
softening edges with patches of green & crooked limbs.
For long after structures have crumbled to dust
nature will reclaim every brick & stone & shard of glass
with stone crushing roots & a fearsome embrace of viridian.

(Copyright 2/17/2006)