​The Shaker Gift Drawing, by Peter Milne Greiner

Tree of Comfort, a Gift from Mother Ann to Eldress Eunice, by Polly Collins (USA) 1859

​The Shaker Gift Drawing
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If I play the question

If I ask it it a thousand times and then lose my voice

If it runs away like a greenhouse effect

If I successfully graft it to others

If I spread it like brodifacoum over the hills

will the search be over and will I know it or not know it

If I pay James Turrell five thousand dollars to visit Roden Crater

will the search be over and will I know it or not know it

If I have my birthday party at Marina Bay Sands this year

will the search be over and will I know it or not know it

If I step foot on Mount Etna

will the search be over and will I know it or not know it

If I ask the adiabat

the branching but closed system

will the search be over and will I know it or not know it

will it answer

If I mix Mister Hyde with a cryptid
 
and a siphonophore and a rat king
 
will the resulting yeti superaggregate
 
at first stir uncertainly and then come to life
 
and if I graft myself to this creature in a closed circuit
 
of erogenous zones and make of my persons a monster 

in an unending season will the search be over 

and will I know it or not know it
 
Will I have reached a higher state of verification

Will I have made contact with a numen

Will something of what truth is still out there bring

to my life a grinding accelerationism

The Tree of Comfort is a drawing made by Polly Collins

who was a Shaker

Fruit trees

networks and orbs

were common amongst drawings of this kind from this time from this community

and so were illusions of symmetry 

and radiation from everyday objects and organisms in the form of script

as if these things were divine dialogic hotspots 

If I play what feel like ideals with the fruit tree

will I hear fine script worthy of analysis or won’t I

If there is a way it can be every season at once

or every day of the year at one time

then there is a way that The Tree of Comfort is the one

I’m under now

in the shade and in the blazing sun 

Peter Milne Greiner

Peter Milne Greiner is the author of Lost City Hydrothermal Field, a collection of poetry and science fiction. PMG is an educator and community water quality tester in NYC.
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