Poison Tree

In fields far away, there was a veiled woman. Her shadowy figure was a stroke amongst dark ultramarine skies, seeping slowly into rich emerald soil through thick sheets of sparkling mist. Hills swept up and down like great ocean waves, consuming trees as if little sailboats. Amid the whirlwind, the veiled woman walked, or perhaps floated, carried along by the cool breath of the wind which blew her along her path.

It was only when the veiled woman paused that the details of her form grew less clouded. She wore a long velvet cloak which concealed her face, and from the inside pocket withdrew a dripping crimson heart - that of her late lover - and buried it deep into the earth.

The soil squelched as her bloodied hands ripped open a hole. A stream of blood pumped out from the heart and injected the juniper earth, guiding a path deep underground. Encased under the soil the organ lay, still beating, and shuddering its surrounds whenever it did so. From beneath the veil, a single tear escaped from the woman’s eye, sealing the surface of the burial. Then, as quickly as she appeared, she evaporated once more into the landscape.

In the nook of a distant oak tree, a spider was weaving its web. Its slender black legs glided along strings of silk, illuminated by light trickling through from the canopy above. As branches swayed, small beads of water dropped from the palms of leaves and caught on the pillars of the spider’s web, adorning its halls like pearls on a neck.

Sitting quietly at the base of the spider’s tree was a quaint little girl. She was small, and the snake-like shadows of the tree limbs climbed up her figure like long, crooked fingers. They reached out from behind her, creeping up the fabric of her dress and into the grooves of her dainty shoulder blades. From above her the spider hung suspended in its silky ribbons, watching her curiously.

It seemed a storm was coming. A strange grey shade wiped over her soft, rosy arms, and her fluffy brown hair shifted into a deep mahogany shade as she threaded strands through twirling fingers perplexingly. She looked up from the base of the tree to peer at the light coming through the branches, but there was none. Her eyes fell back down to gaze at her arms, which were all one colour. Her dress too, had no contrast. The vivid scene around her had diluted into a single shadowy note. It drained the colour from her face so that her skin appeared sickly and transluscent. The rims of her eyes began to widen so much that it pulled at the corners of her cheeks. She felt a queer vibration humming through the body of the tree, but was fixed to her position at its base. She peered upwards at the branches once more, terrified now. Her eyes, so large and white that they dominated her face like big doting ceramic balls.

Her eyes, so open and wide.

The now rotting heart buried deep under the tree pumped a sedated beat. Its blood was so spoilt it was almost black, its veins so supple they folded and twisted within the muscles. The drop of blood from the slow beat trickled from the major arteries and travelled through the soil. A bloodied trail squirmed through the pathways of tree roots, climbing up the body of the tree slowly. It slithered up channels of roots until it reached an arching branch whose tip hovered just above the big, wide eyes belonging to the girl. As the droplet slipped through the dips and edges of the branch, it eventually pooled at the tip of the twig. With one, tranquil motion, the drop of poison was expelled from the end of the branch like a spell from a wand, landing without a splash in the whites of the girl’s eyes.

The moon above the hillside possessed a familiar white beam reminiscent of the poisoned girl’s eyes. It cast a pearlescent haze over the sky, like a big vaporous cloud that had entangled itself within all of the stars and the constellations. The hills were stained a midnight blue so the only thing distinguishing the sky from the land were the shadowed arms of the poison tree which cracked the horizon like long nails on preaching fingers.

It was under the cool bask of the silver moon, that the veiled woman appeared once more. She returned to the site of her blooming poison tree to find the girl limp and unsupported by its bark. From above her decaying body, the veiled woman observed her. Much like the mist of the moon, the woman’s face was sheltered by the lacy filter of her veil. Though her expressions were blurred and incoherent, her unwavering watchfulness revealed what could have been a pensive mourning. There, she hovered, as if a figment from a dream, or perhaps a shadow from a nightmare. Such concentration was held within that stance that the veiled woman’s posture did not shift as she retrieved a knife from inside her cloak. It was long and smooth and glinted under the blinking of the stars. Her slender, ghastly fingers cradled the ornate golden handle. In one clean motion, she plunged at the girl with a calculating precision, carving out her heart and placing the thing, beating and bubbling, in another hole beside the poison tree.

The moon from the same night provided the light of a thousand years on the burial site, and soon a budding sapling emerged. By the morning, there was another brilliant tree adorned with glorious fresh leaves. From the leaves, splendid flower buds blossomed and bloomed, expanding with deep purple petals like frocks on women standing up to dance. They glimmered in the purity of daybreak, and when the bees had awoken from their nightly slumber, they flocked to the centres of the flowers for golden pollen, which they licked and licked until their little tongues shimmered. As one of the bees withdrew from its ritualistic collection, it happened to spot an elderly man taking a stroll through the fields. The bee, buzzing in place, observed the man thoughtfully before deciding to mingle in his parameters.

Perhaps the bee had mistaken the man for a flower. His attire was vibrant, so colourful it could have easily placed him in the same category as the lush petals on the tree. Yet, his eyes were dark and sunken, mourning something unknown to the bee as it speculated curiously around him. The small creature darted about in flight, and in doing so, saw the details of his face which looked aged and wearied from years of travel. His wrinkles etched markings of unfulfilled endeavours, and his watery gaze echoed years of solidarity.

The man, already burdened with his own life, did not understand the curiosity of the bee and grew frustrated with its irritating buzzing. He began swatting at the bee, who was confronted by his violence. In return, the bee swooped at his face angrily, buzzing loudly in quick trails around his ears, his wrinkled nose, his sopping eyes. The man expanded into an expressive lividity, twisting and turning with his face screwed up in angst, until he tripped and collapsed onto a spot on the soil. The bee, with that pinching dagger at its tail, stabbed him right in his impuissance, inflicting a shooting pain which blew out from the man in a gasp from creased, stubbled lips.

Like clockwork, the veiled woman reemerged in the darkness alongside the waking moon to fulfil her nightly ritual.

By the morning, all that was left of the old man was a tree in the spot of his last breath.

A poison garden was created within hillside canons. Every night, a heart was buried, and every day, a new tree would emerge. The trees grew tall and sprouted with divine buds which sung out to animals wide and far. Birds and insects and woodland creatures flocked to the ever-expanding paradise garden. Vivid emerald grass blades grew slender and long, brushing against the bark tree bases like decadent soft hair. Flowers contained vivid centres which invited the amusement of flying curiosities. Tree branches reached higher and higher, and seeds from plants plummeted lower and lower to coat immense patches of ground in lush, thick shrubbery. The garden was extensive, and seemed to awaken with more vitality at every sunrise. When it rained, the porous leaves and delicate plant petals shone in a silky sheen. When it stormed, the garden came alive as if possessed by shaking human bodies. It was a site of magic, charmed and propelled forward only by the putrid, rotting remains of the souls buried deep beneath the sprouts.

One of the most precious flowers to breed from the abundance of the garden was the fatale perlée. It sprouted from a small, deep, viridian bush- shrubbery that emerged from the garden floor from falling seeds displaced by snakes and furred forest creatures. Its leaves were short and spiked like electric shots of lightning. Yet, from them emerged a glorious violet bud. Once opened, it sprawled out into silky white petals with an inky magenta bleeding from the centre. One night, during a storm, the petals were saturated by a heavy downfall. As thunder rolled in vibrations through the hill, it shuddered through the stems of the plant and awoke the precious buds, so that the lightning from the steamy sky could strike the very middle of the flower, placing a smooth pearl amongst the petals with a delightful precision. The next foggy morning when the mockingbirds had awoken, one fetched the pearl from the flower and bursted from atop the canopy. It whirred through the countryside, producing a melodic tune which echoed and reverberated through the rolling hills.

There’s birdsong from outside of the veiled woman’s window. She gazes across the fields and catches the haze of her poison garden sparkling in the sunlight over the distant hills. In bright, beautiful whirs the mockingbirds dart across the sky, drawing closer and closer to her windowpane. They kindly drop the pearl on the sill and the veiled woman slides it over into her dominion with her pointy, crooked fingers.

She is quiet. Her home is quiet. The only sound to emerge from her quarters is the whispers of string slipping through the pearl’s centre as the veiled woman threads it through a long necklace. From underneath her veil she wraps it around her neck tenderly. She knows she is a tender woman. She sees the tenderness. She sees the tenderness as she creeps up to a looking glass that glints with sunlight from the window at the corner of the room.

With trembling hands, she lifts the veil so it flutters behind her. She sees the tenderness again. Her pearls, all lined up along her neck, all relics of her murders, fruitions from the souls from which she feeds. They look so pure, nestled along her tender neck. One by one, she thinks about her possessions. She thinks about her late lover, and his doting offspring, and the old man whose travels brought them together, and the sprawling spiderweb of people that ever led him to her. How tender it was that one by one, they disappeared from the world, never for her to see again except as precious pearls adorning her gracefully. Her eyes, which possess an alluring misty grey pigment, meet with its own gaze in the looking glass, and consume her within fields of fog far away. With her gaze lost once more in the sublime, she echoes a gothic garden blessing:

A tender curse has sewn these hills 

Stitched drops of dew to daffodils  

A poison tree blooms where the heart of a man 

Was carved from his body by a tender hand. 

Blue Landscape; oil on paper (26x18 cm) by Fritz Jooste