Donika Kelly

Desire Path: Sequoia

Today I see the faces in everything: the trees across the street, the clouds in Ansel Adams’sThe 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.