I am watching the humans wrap the Sequoias.
They're swaddling them like babies,
these three thousand year old trees.
The rolls of foil go round and round, 36 feet at the girth.
And the colossus standing helpless
in the umber air, the glare
like a Rothko, those dusky, saturated reds, the plumes
of heat and smoke rising ten thousand feet.
We trusted they would outlast us,
that we could always taste a little immortality, traces
of the first inchoate oneness
before it clustered into matter, this billowing multiplicity.
Splendor, and splendor, a poet once wrote.
I have gazed up at them like stars, only closer.
I have laid hands on their rough flanks. Once
they didn't need our mercy. Once fire was their lover, flame
that sprung seed from the cone. I cannot fathom
the span they've endured, standing erect on the planet, dinosaurs
breathing their rich exhalations. I try to imagine
one tree saved, alone, roots reaching out to touch
nothing, a monarch without a realm, survivor
who escapes a burning house
while the bones of his family smolder, embers
flickering, alive through the winter.