The Cypress King

Getty Fire, 2019 I.

Call it soft, our evacuation.

The gallery is sealing up the irises,
the sprinklers left on.

Overhead the Pacific

falls in long white veils
and out of the smoke a raven lights
upon his cypress

like a wick in reverse.

It's autumn and our maps are yellowing.
Our Tuscan crowns
describe a wind Angelenos call devil

and the Spanish a saint.

(Here you may choose your syllables
by their dead.) Topanga.

The Above Place or just Above.

II.

My hand bridges shores on the canyon wall,
the bones of reef, mollusks like ossicles
listening in the rock
(no, be present).
Visiting hours may be affected.
Each year the old Colonials make way
for mid-century steel and faux-marble
reliefs, porticoes and rows of cypress
meant to make our Iowa by the Sea
seem a touch more mediterranean.
In a thousand years these constellations
of wild mustard or the eucalyptus,
blue-grey as fog breaking over the coast,
blue-gray as fingers, lips
(no, be present),
or the cypress, will they be native then?
The children are out hunting arrowheads,
tongues of soapstone they strike like flint—a game
of war against the past or its presence,
how it lies there in strata we call beds,
listening to Firehawks roll back the waves
and refusing to speak, to play.

III.

How will I make a little home for us in time?
A window in a white room looking on benign

carnations or a cypress raised from the Dead Sea?
In Europe they're considered cemetery trees,

a different sort of property line, taper-thin,
and solemn as those distant strains of violin

that lingered on the intercom. Your hands, her gloves,
the nun whose throat Modigliani would have loved,

the way she wiped the ventilator clean: I've tried
to shut some details out. A memory baptized

or thinned like chaparral, like sage or last year's fronds,
a supplication to the weather we named god

which brings fire, growth, and other symptoms of decline.
How will I make a little home for us? In time.

IV.

topanga         where the summit takes the tide
listen and you can hear it         something sharp
spills an ocean         from the ceremony
of the sky         and in my dreams the earth drags

a cypress down         to a pillar of ash
smoke eating lungs         into the dead mountain
or smoke eating         into the mountain's lungs
we too darken where we stand         we too breathe

the movement out of stars         (heat has its costs)
like a black feather         against a child's palm
like a single word of light         redacted
your warmth         kept captive on a line of gas

we too         are horizons in the making
and when they rolled you god         the fire map

V.

It's early, for a century,
so name your savior: Christ or controlled burns,
coyotes on the switchbacks shaking ghosts from their fur or
just ash. This sweetgum's seed
a sun-skin warming in my palm.
Show me a life sustainable: the raven or his cypress,
the Irises of J. Paul Getty priceless,
and fading safety under marble and alarm

or branches crossing fingers with the power lines.
The fire, too, passes
and light, conceived in absence,
will burn cold after cold redeems the last flame.
Today in hospice someone chose the hour, the wine.
The children peeling off their names.

 

 --Nicolas Yingling