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| Hans Baldung St Sebastian 1514 woodcut Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Gerolamo Giovenone St Sebastian ca. 1525 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Lucas van Leyden God forbidding Adam and Eve to eat the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge 1529 engraving Teylers Museum, Haarlem |
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| Pieter Feddes Achior, Captain of the Ammonites, bound to a Tree 1615 etching Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| follower of Peter Paul Rubens Figure bound to a Tree ca. 1620 drawing Art Institute of Chicago |
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| attributed to Anthony van Dyck Martyr bound to a Tree before 1641 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
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| Anonymous French Artist Kneeling Model with Bound Wrists ca. 1685 drawing National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Maria Cosway Man binding another to a Tree ca. 1780-90 drawing Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| George Romney Shepherdess cutting an Inscription on a Tree ca. 1785 drawing Yale Center for British Art |
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| Raphael Morghen after Teodoro Matteini Angelica and Medoro (scene from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso) 1795 engraving British Museum |
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| Joseph Bergler the Younger Men breaking off Tree Branches 1807 etching Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Julius Caesar Ibbetson Druids cutting Mistletoe from an Oak before 1817 drawing, with watercolor Yale Center for British Art |
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| Alphonse Legros Centaur brandishing Tree Trunk ca. 1890 drawing National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Anonymous French Artist Figure bound to a Tree 19th century drawing, with watercolor Yale University Art Gallery |
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| Joan Hassall Young Man pondering under a Tree 1938 wood-engraving (book illustration) Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Duane Michals René and Georgette Magritte holding Hands behind a Tree 1965 gelatin silver print Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
Hands Are Wood
Come see the woodpile behind the cannery.
Come through the wall
to where the wood was chopped
and the difficult wood was hewed.
There is a short history of commotion here,
where a sudden bonfire spat its surprise
at the sky –
a hundred feet or more the shavings swept
through disturbed air, and made their own
music, the music hands make, such a yellow
crackle and such a thrashing
in the morning.
Come wait for the heavy trucks to arrive,
the men in dusters cutting the twine,
loading the long ghostly planks like ballast
into iron barges.
This will be packing for a transatlantic box,
or paper for essays on schadenfreude, or timber
for dollhouse dressers, or a twenty baht note
for the Thai rubber trade. These matchsticks
will burn whenever you strike them, and this,
hack at it however you like, is nothing more
than deadwood for the fire. Come see – now
even the men are doing only
what they were made to do.
– Seth Abramson (2008)