The Impermanence of Faces - Meditating on Desire Path: Sequoia by Donika Kelly

I am reading Desire Path: Sequoia by Donika Kelly today in Poetry magazine (see below for the poem) and meditating upon the theme of the impermanence of faces. 

We, as humans, are minuscule and transient. Faces that will disappear like clouds.  We see them today everywhere, and tomorrow there are no where to be seen.  Perhaps some will appear, like Ghalib says in his Ghazal Sab Kahaan, through beautiful flowers.  
Sab kahaan kuchhh lalaa-o-gul mein numaaya ho gayeen
Khaak main kyaa suratein hongi ki pinhaa ho gayeen
Where are they all, a few manifest in beautiful flowers
What spectacular faces must have beem that the ground now hides 
Our impermanence can swiftly transform our existence, making us vulnerable like something inflammable. Like Baba Farid says, don't touch the safflower, O love, it will burn.  It is vulnerable and flammable. 
Hath na laayi kasumbharai, jal jaasi dhola 


Everything that currently possesses a distinct identity, even objects with faces, will eventually lose their individuality and merge with the vastness of the universe. Time will gradually deposit layers upon them, turning them into sediment, blending them into the fabric of eternity. This reminds me of Shams Mashraqi's Persian poem Har Lehza where he talks about find the trickster love in every face:

Har lehza ba shakl aan but-e-ayyar baraamad  
Dil burd-o-nihaan shud 
Har dum ba libaas-e-digar aan yaar baraamad 
Gah peer-o-jawaan shud 

O' that trickster idol-beloved! Every time he made an appearance, he had a different face
He pulled the people's hearts, And hid from view. 
Every time he came out in a different garb
He was sometimes young, And sometimes he was old.
The future remains unknown, and perhaps we need to express gratitude for this lack of foresight.  Or the gratitude for the foresight to see the one in all, and thereby not needing to know that everything is impermanent.

Desire Path: Sequoia


The poem is titled "Desire Path: Sequoia" to evoke the sense of longing and the connection between human desires and the majestic Sequoia tree. The term "Desire Path" suggests an unconventional route or an intuitive path created by human yearning. In this context, it represents the speaker's deep connection with nature and their vulnerability, symbolized by the Sequoia.

Desire Path: Sequoia
By Donika Kelly

Today I see the faces in everything:
the trees across the street, the clouds

in Ansel Adams’s The 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.

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