Jack Snyder (he/they) is a philosopher and process–based artist from the Southern Californian wilderness. His work interrogates thorny philosophical themes in a natural setting. Jack’s work has appeared in RiverCraft and Sanctuary magazines.
Eulogy to the Banner Pine
This is a
Eulogy to the banner pine
Who grew in the sharp and chipped granite White-sand detritus
Rice-cake air
Wind-weary krummholz
And crumpled manzanita
Where pinus longaeva overtakes pinus flexilis
Where chipmunks grew up by the now-shattered Weather-blackened rings of his trunk
Here spared by Army Corps surveyors
And great mountain men in need of lumber
And so later sleepful freezings
But greater hordes came as they do
Trambling for gold and other precious earth-things
Chipping away at his roots
Wormed deep in the rough soil
And cruel jags of the Bowl tearing away
Inch by avalanche-induced inch
My avarice ignored the threat
Until I destined his eclipse
And so
Wanting only a challenge
A proof of a fabled manliness
I stuck my amateur axe into him
Splintered the woody core
So sure in myself the cracking was thunderous applause
And burst of sweet butterscotch and vanilla was to lionize
I felled him on that lonely gray plane
Arched as if to brush the sky
Michelangelo’s Adam touching God
And drug him across the bald wash
To the round summit
With no second thought to thousands of sunsets
And no nod to storms weathered or sun rays drunk
His trunk snapped and groaned
Psithurism of ancients now silenced
And as I stuck him to my gusto
Anchored and pierced with pitons
Claws
Fierce and angry
Ripped into his bark
Wrapped with a ratchet and twenty feet
Of gutsy
Human cable
Clicked
Shuddered
Held tight
To the trunk of
In my eyes
Just another pine