Dominion
& subdue it. & have dominion over the fish of the sea, & over the fowl
of the air, & over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’”
- Genesis 1:28
But to the trees we are,
like metaphor, mostly
extraneous, our language,
to them, the breath-
play of peasants. Picture
this world without us,
you say, the sick planet picked
clean—as by a kind
of divine wind—of ruin
& war. Of word. We turn
west on the Redwood Trail late
on a Sunday. The endangered
sequoias vanish above us
& there is nothing, you say,
or no place the planet
is unaffected. Its feverish
heaving. The breathing trees turning
over & over their old
air. We are
all of us lung. What
Cabrillo breathed. What bands
of Ohlone women walked
beside in silence. I
would be for you
like the railroad the ravager
of all of this. Would give
vast acreages to make you
immortal. I am not
in the slightest sorry. Tonight
I will tie you to the bed—bolted
pinewood—& we
will make the frame whine. & when
the idea of people
is over, as I hope
it is quickly, I hope
the trees remain. The language-
less. The in-
describable night.
This poem originally appeared in Harpur Palate and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.
Christopher Kempf is a Ph.D. student in English Literature at the University of Chicago, and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Recipient of a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, his writing has appeared in Gettysburg Review, , and The New Republic, among other places. More work can be read at his .
