The Meat Tree by Gwyneth Lewis Page B

fragrant meadow ­ ­­ sweet July and high summer the oak with its flowers.’
    So Gwydion stands there and pillages time to conjure up meadowsweet. And the tall stalks shake as if in ecstasy. They bloom.

    *

    Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 12:54

    Apprentice
    I stand erect. I have no eyes but a feel for gravity, from my dark, damp root up to the finest veins and the tips of my flowers. I’m a translator, a poet of the sun, transforming the spectrum into tiny hands that move in light’s wake, stroking the world with blind but sensitive tendrils.
    I have no ears, but my body bursts through the skin of buds, its surface area grows, and feels how vegetation scuffles, groans in competition for the light. I smell the stress that tearing, striving, being crushed, causes in wild garlic, dog’s mercury and squill. And as the Earth turns, like a dancer with a pliant back, I shift my weight to stay upright in my perfect static pirouette until, with grace, I take my bow as darkness falls and close my leaves.

    *

    Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 13:06

    Inspector of Wrecks
    And then we join forces, Gwydion and I. We imagine the perfect woman for Lleu. She’s sultry as early spring days, long, slender and bright as the stalks of Genista. She’s modest as meadowsweet but has a whole spectrum of emotional life, as complex as its fragrance. She’s strong as oak, resilient as acorns that swell from the buds of the flowers. She pulls animals and birds in close to her, is a shelter.
    And the body we conjure out of buds, flowers and seeds isn’t an orphan. She’s our daughter – mine and Math’s. It’s our minds that give birth to her, in the shape of our delights, our fondness, our grief. Maybe our failings. And we lay her to grow in the best of ourselves, making room for a consciousness not our own, but that of the forest’s. And it feels like pain but isn’t as we’ve woven her out of everything that we both know about love and awareness and we’re sure it’s enough, that its generosity can make up for the loss of a mother, that our meaning well will do right by Lleu and create a home which is a form of justice that the boy deserves.
    And in the middle of this I, Campion, ask: What kind of being does a virtual world create? If two negatives make a positive, then can two virtuals make an actual? Have we just conjured up a person who’s real? Or one who is death?

    *

    Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 14:30

    Apprentice
    I lie here with my eyes half open and something works its way with me.
    I dream of cells illuminated by a soft green light. Chloroplast. Ribosomes. Organelles, packed tight like batteries. I find galleries of green within myself, strings of proteins, they breathe through fibres. I’m in a forest of amino acids – protein chains which sway, like saplings, then blossom with molecular flowers. I move like mercury through the maze of matter. Cells throb, growth happens in jumps. I stretch, luxurious in the light, knowing that my intelligence is a web of filaments and filigrees, specialised in feeding on the tiniest amounts for the greatest results. Inside is sap which is drawn out by capillary action and soon a new energy runs up my spine, a pulse of excitement. How will things look from this new point of view?
    Everything’s possible, ripens in me. I follow the sun and in the dark, I bow in obedience. I am unknow­­able to Math and Gwydion, hum with information that they just infer from their loud talk and posturing. I reach up to the spires of giant oaks and down into mosses where I gather myself in the heart of the root web. I flex my muscles with an old, old power.
    Death doesn’t alarm me. That makes me alien to them. I can make patterns from how things decay. I take joy in the humus and I bury light as easy as bask in it, so that the webs in between the fingers I stretch to their limit, and my ears and my toes are translucent and beautiful as