Yellow Tree

There is a tree that holds everyone who ever touched it. The woman with dark hair who rested her back against its trunk on an August afternoon in 1943. The children who climbed its lower branches before they became soldiers, then ghosts. The monks in saffron who passed beneath its canopy for three hundred years. They are all still there, absorbed into the grain, their faces emerging when the light falls at certain angles. This is what the painting knows. It shows us what happens when memory becomes matter—when the dead do not leave but simply change their state of being. The central passage of pale, almost spectral light suggests the space between worlds, the threshold where the living can still glimpse those who have passed through. Some figures strain upward, reaching for something above the frame. Others turn toward each other in eternal conversation. A few look directly outward, meeting our gaze across the membrane of the canvas, asking if we recognize them, if we remember what we have forgotten. The tree holds them all without judgment, without hierarchy. It simply grows, incorporating everything it touches into its expanding body of years.