In the 1890s, two slices of a 1300-year-old Giant Sequoia were sent to the Natural History Museums of London and Washington D.C. The London specimen, roughly 5 meters in diameter, was restored in 2016.
When they scrape back the gel
the trunk touches air, medullary rays
like an x-marks-the-spot.
Split in radials for shipping a century ago,
you look like an eleven-hour clock but vast
and quieter than time. You require
a scaffold and team of small brushes,
grand in your deterioration as the finest
Renaissance fresco—Botticelli, Michelangelo, God reaching
while the lacquer cracks.
In another world you grew
and fed and slept one-thousand, three-hundred times,
your cambium swelling with spring.
In a forever black-and-white California
a man poses on a ladder. Tree that was
taller than the Statue of Liberty
lying on the ground behind him. On the ground, another man
and then a woman in a white skirt.
Their expressions are dwarfed by circumference.
He removes his hat.
She leans as if suddenly tired
against a thousand years of rings.
