Ekphrasis Exercise

This was inspired by Raoul Hague's "Untitled" sculpture, created in 1975 using reshaped walnut tree trunks. The shape of the sculpture reminded me of a female body, so I worked from that premise and developed this short piece.

Juglans regia

In the dark, I see her stomach rising and falling like the phases of the moon. She hasn’t much time left, but I can’t help but pause in the doorway to see the light falling silver on her skin in the dark, electrifying and gilding. The walnut tree outside was dancing and moaning with the wind and somehow she was one with it, two great limbs of pale woodenness surrounding an absence, a cavity where something was and is not anymore. I’d been carved out years ago and left her hollow, concave with wanting. The grain is irregular, dipping here and there in droops and folds, but I know it is beautiful. I climbed these limbs when I was small and hid myself among them. 
We ate walnuts by the handfuls then, cracking shells and leaving them littering the front porch. Walnut breads, risottos, roasted with sugared sweet potatoes so the aroma spread itself throughout the house like a thick blanket coating my hair, my clothes. I had no other companion; sometimes she didn’t feel like my mother, more like a second self. When she cradled me at night I felt like I could almost sink back into her, complete the circle again to make her stomach full and round like in the pictures she showed me on the mantle. The walnut tree was strong and full then. She was beautiful in those pictures, long hair flowing down onto her shoulders all the down to her stomach, encircled by her own arms. She stood in front of the gate of the house, face dappled with the walnut’s shadow, her body as full and strong as its limbs. The picture was still on the mantle, but I no longer lived within her or within the confines of the house that had been my kingdom. When I left fifteen years ago, I felt as though I were carving out some portion of her as well, hollowing out the core of her being. She was hollow ever since, growing smoother and leaner with the wind and rain. I wanted to stay, but my roots had grown beyond the ragged fence and I felt the walls of the house pressing in on me. I had outgrown the taste of walnuts; I preferred harder, bitter flavors. Yet at the beck of a spidery handwriting’s call I’ve drifted back, back to the crumbling house and the shell-speckled lawn. 
She will not last much longer, the hospice nurse said. They’ve cut the malignancy out of her stomach (I cannot help but feel offended) but still she falters, weakens. I wonder if I am a malignancy too, a bacteria worming its way into the wooden whorls it once called a home. A few hours, and she will never been empty again, only filled with something I cannot give her. I want to stay with her but I don’t feel strong enough, I want to brush the leaves from the open window off her bed and murmur Oh Susannah, Oh Susannah as I brush her hair, still long but faded. I want to graft new stems onto the hole, to make her gaping body smooth again.  
Her stomach is a waxing crescent, stiller and stiller by the minute. I smell creaking wood and hear the walnut tree splinter in the wind.