The Sequoia Shape Poem by Tom Goff

Cold groves of sequoias. Your hand in mine, ensuring
our icily spiral climb turns by slow footfalls.
Upended, the odd giant victim-tree, whose root ball’s
all snowburst spike: can blasts freeze into enduring?

Truer, more secret endurance instills the live trunk.
A narwhal strength-of-tusk stability
(“unicorn” horn-swirl torsion) nulls fragility.
Sequoias in skyward spiral designs can link

sunbeam to soil by long thoughtlike chains. Intrinsic
twists drink in a great dark that dispenses light.
O’Keeffe with her vulviform flowers, mystics, eccentrics…

Such sequoia-like seekers envelop our quest for insight:
my whirling-out, restrained by your deepening-down
—the transparent aspiring kind of dark suction down.