Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens)


Who am I to write you?
I have not stood still
while fire embroidered
my trunk with scars.
Haven't been
worshipped from below
by the unarmed
thimbleberry, or
salmonberry, its trinity
of leaf sets. Never
mocked by minivans
driven through
my heartwood, faces
grinning from the hollow
part of me.
I do not welcome
the fog like you, but rail
when they blind me.
I lack your resistance
to disease, cannot pull
gallon after gallon
against gravity
to the canopy.
All you've seen.
Centuries.
The crystalline sky
so far from this
blackened base.
Tell me about the place
from where your hope
sprouts. See there—
a couple
is hunting through
the soft, red needles
at your foundation, looking
for a seed cone.
They expect something
grand, do not
understand this kind
of endurance begins
slight, unassuming.
Let them search.
We are all
fools in your presence.

Somewhere in New England


I was a west coast transplant to a place
where west was just the direction
the sun went to get away from it all
at the end of a hard day on the farm.
My friends reduced to voices on the phone,
the acacia's lemon-yellow flowers relegated
to memory. Not long ago, I could spit on the ground
and things grew, abundance not contained
by shifts in weather, sections of the year.
But, here, the crocuses having just opened
their baby bird mouths, the clock was ticking.
I drove, unfamiliar routes splaying like vines
before me, until I found the sign on the second pass,
got out and popped the trunk. A tall man dressed
in collared flannel, blue jeans, waved, then
stopped the mower and came over to say hello,
marching toward me up the hill, work boot laces
keeping a regular beat. I was trying to figure out
how the cash box worked and feeling grateful
for strong arms approaching that would help me
lift heavy bags of compost, but instead
he gathered me up in a hug warm
as freshly-mown grass, told me how glad he was
to see me, before he understood I was a stranger.
“You look so much like her,” he apologized.
We talked about my move – how the horizon
lacked water now, how on certain days, if I closed
my eyes when I heard the rustle of the corn fields,
the smell of the waves could overtake me.
He said he never lived near an ocean,
squinted hard in my direction, tried to suss out
my kind, while I stood, suddenly alone.
This was a town that went all in on celery—
hero of the soup pot, practical, sturdy specimen—
lauded it with a straight face, painted it
on the sides of barns. But I needed
to put something in dirt that would open into color,
set roots before the trees went bare
and hung with snow. Compost loaded, I stood,
hand on the car door, surveying the roads
that led me there, trying to trace the way back.