Pygmalion Haibun

Ovid, not every object holds a woman waiting. Not every tree seeks a furnished future. High in the Huon, I am already imagining praise as I dress for desecration. The forest does not stop me. What I find is whole, intact, ready to be shaped, cut, curved. Altar or grave—I am unsure but I have learned that lasting things invite hands. I translate standing into purpose. Bark becomes excess. Stillness becomes error. I pull away strips until the twisting resembles cooperation. This is what craftsmanship means. I call this listening. I shave and plane metal against memory’s rings. Each circle tells me how long it has been preparing for me. Opens like a record. I tell myself to name this discovery. Pale curls fall. Light enters. The surface brightens. This feels like affection. Every cut answers to me and my splendid act of creation. you miss my forest to focus on rings I grew when I felt alive. The blade keens in anger, the grain tightens, curves under the new instruction. I have always corrected what resists me. There is a form inside that needs my hands to finish it. I believe this because my father believed it. We were taught where truth lives. We were taught how to reach into another’s body to find it. I have inherited the certainty that creation requires force. That beauty comes quiet only after I sand away what refuses me. I call it grace. I call it art. I do not question what it was holding itself up for. I carefully assemble the chair. I run my palm along its back. It is warm. I sit. It creaks the way bodies do when they adjust. I shift my weight. It holds. I relax into the success of it. I trust what I have made to know me. So surprised am I when later in betrayal—it gives, when the leg angles just enough, when the balance fails without warning—I am shocked by how this feels. I had shaped this. I had listened. I do not understand where the fault was hiding. I search the break for proof of deception. I have trusted something I shaped to hold me. Where was the fault hidden? I do not recognize my craftsmanship in the fracture. I blame my tools. I refuse to be shaped by this failure. I will not learn that a truth imposed holds no weight at an altar or a grave. I, left now prone and prayer-formed amid my mistake, I have ignored resistance and called it intimacy.

Note: this is ontological erasure—the poem and haiku exist inside the prose and reflects a being that cannot remove itself from its surroundings. Inspiration taken from torrin a. greathouse’s “Burning Haibun” and a line of poetry by Ruby Gross. I am the creator of this form.