Desire Path: Sequoia

Today I see the faces in everything:

the trees across the street, the clouds

in Ansel Adams’s The Golden Gate

Before the Bridge, San Francisco,

California. In the picture, I’m not hugging

the sequoia; I’m showing the woman

behind the camera I am small, young,

that I’ve always been vulnerable

to fire, and I am smiling to know this.

I am holding my arms perpendicular

to the plane of my body, which is parallel

to the plane of the tree, the tree

between my arms, outstretched,

and in so doing I am saying to the woman

behind the camera: You too are small, young,

you have always been vulnerable to fire.

In taking the picture, she says: I agree.

You are small. The picture is on a screen

in a hotel room. The woman behind the camera

a figment of memory, her face smudged,

imprecise. There is pleasure in planes

gone to silt, in time (as with water, as with wind)

doing its sedimentary work. Pleasure

in what’s past—the feeling of the tree’s

rough bark, its trunk as whole

between my arms as the Golden Gate,

through either peninsula, running

into ocean under only one horizon—

pleasure in not knowing (fire, steel,

grief) what’s yet to come.