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One day Pete's lung
suddenly collapsed. There was nothing in the anamnesis to indicate a cause for
the collapse, "spontaneous" was all his doctor said. This was hardly comforting to
Peter so, familiar with my research in landscape anatomy, he asked me for my perspective.
Before the collapse, Pete's healthy lung was a hollow pink bronchial tree growing out of the lips of a crevice. Air would flow through the branches and out to the tips which were micaceous with billions of tiny alveolar leaf-buds, clustered so densely that the lung appeared solid. During diastole it shimmered like the hologram of a schist boulder. Flocking around Pete's lung were vast clouds of bluebird blood cells. They would swoop in as a mass and delicately kiss the bubbled oxygen off the alveoli, blushing a brilliant red as they did so. The lung swayed to air currents just like any oak or maple tree only in reverse, with the breezes issuing from underground. In the case of Pete's lung, there was the shadow of a wound he sustained from the second cigarette he smoked when he was twelve. He stole his first stick from his mother's pack who, having caught him, made him smoke on the back steps until he got sick. The first stick was healthy and affirmed the father, but the second stick contained a feminine smoke which is deadly to a young boy. If that piece of woman smoke were alive, it would have looked like a tiny black snake coiled like a question mark waiting to be answered many years later. |
| 1/15/01 | oil on linen | 28"w X 31 1/2"h |
