On the Rumored Immortality of Giant Sequoia
You can measure your life against the monarchs.
You can overwinter an evergreen
black and orange, asleep in the colony, its season forever
collapsing in the wrong direction—upwards
to some final border your children must cross.
You can shed wings with the eucalyptus
and be no older than this land’s conversion, like fire,
into a state. But what of the sequoia?
Its overstory has outgrown Christ and the Christ Father
Serra shaped from its soft heartwood.
Doesn’t it invite you into its shade? Here,
where fire opened millennia and failed, feel absence
fall into its own perfect column: the one
our bodies break.
On the Rumored Immortality of Art
For depth he substitutes layers:
the Atlantic all sundown and ice floe,
a few black and white
auks left unfinished in the dusk.
This is trompe l’oeil, of course. The birds
long dead, the painter
will be forced to buy one in town
already posed. He shoulders his flintlock
over the current, his boots
haloed by the dying
hour and the ripples opening wider and wider
until he too is pentimento
and somewhere waves of another sea
wash onto the same continent.
It’s a touch Romantic
for our artist: the dawn all soot
and silhouette and one giant sequoia
to draw the eye,
to take each burning ring in,
year after year, and keep growing.
–
Nicholas Yingling is the author of The Fire Road (Barrow Street Press). His work has appeared in Poetry Daily, The Adroit Journal, The Missouri Review, 32 Poems, Pleiades, Colorado Review, and others. He lives in Los Angeles.