Meet Matthieu Nadeau '12, our talented writer for this week's State of the Arts.

Distances

Like all teared bearers of ear and iris, I wonder
how, beneath the crackling velvet night of
the chorus frogs, or in that hovering May
mist expelled by the broad hull of April sky,
it’s true that no branch extends from trunk
to root, think: how many strange shades of sad-
ness expand in a bright Misratan instant, when a
boatload of bevel-jawed men with cameras to
their open eyes flashing like angel masks
can die, shrapnel-faced, billowing feathery ash
into those red-grained photographs you can
always tell frame the dead, frame men named
Telemachus that never for a fought day were distant.

In the sloping, cricketing dark then: I wonder
how, when I tell my friend he will enjoy a certain film
and he agrees without having seen it, he later tells me
that a scene of a film I enjoy, which he has seen, is
rather stupid, with all the metamorphosis of birds
and such. I think, the trees, they betray me.
For amidst the pollen that rises like fog and the
scent of hardpooled fungi clinging to the belly of
the wooded like excess caulking, I see a stark
orange garbage truck, slithering vertebra by
hopper through the spitting potholes, flanked, as if split
and doubled by the mirror that hides a magician’s
rabbit within its box, by a pair of humans, standing

heels up, floating, in identical yellow rain suits.
And I think: at least the garbage is still pretty.

State of the Arts is a new initiative by the Echo Blog aimed at getting more student art out there.