The Title of this Poem is Untitled

to Jean Baudrillard

The shape emerges on the print
only if you stand back at least 5 feet.
The tree is blurred by repeated photographs of
pictures of the tree on a television screen.

The original is a long way off
in a field on the edge of town.

Nobody has seen it,
the real tree,
but they love this print
this picture of the
spindly leafless maple.

More than the tree itself.
The tree isn’t even there anymore
they cut it down for a vinyl-village development.

The following pictures slowly
replace the tree with magnified versions
of the tiny phosphors on the television. We look at
our world through those dots.

We love the reproduced television pictures even better
than the original of just the tree.

We are the same people
who will never understand
the size of a whale
because we have only seen them
from 75 feet in the air
off the side
of a cruise-ship of thousands.