“What is Essential is Invisible to the Eye”*
Lisa Janice Cohen
January 14, 2026
The road curves. It leans into hillsides shaped
by the ghosts of trees long since felled to make
way for hardscrabble pastures, stone walls, dour
farmers who believed in progress until the day
it flattened them beneath its broad wheels. Houses
ground to rubble and sticks, moving the dead
expedient. Only the living left to complain.
In the end, we are the ones owned by geography.
What grows is changed by sunlight and soil
until we rarely recognize ourselves outside
of the places we were first planted. We are all
interlopers here. Even those who count lineage
through faded headstones and common names.
I am still new enough to be struck silent by the ice
coated glitter of a bare maple. A white birch
glows against the leaden sky and I want to weep
with the futility of explaining why
you should care about a single ordinary tree
when the world contains forest after forest.
It would be easy to blame the first miner
who carved coal from a seam deep in the earth.
Or the first roustabout who drove a drill
through the ground for oil. But we have always
been remaking the world, deciding this mountain,
this lake, this town means little in our abundance.
Trading our futures for gold as if joy and sorrow
both were fungible assets. The sky spits
rain and snow, unable to decide the season.
I return to the road, now cut through a farm
on the valley floor. Horses in winter coats
graze, incurious about the ribbon that divides
their pasture. None of the beauty that undoes me
is ancient or original. Everywhere, everything
is built on loss. Not far from here, a farmer
discovered a single elm sapling growing
straight and true toward the sun, splitting
the rotted stump of what we were certain
had already died. Maybe the universe
isn’t finished with us yet. I choose to believe
this is a promise, not a threat.
* Title is a quote from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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