evidence of things not seen

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Through an igneous erosion of stone has grown
a single Ponderosa, straight as an unthreaded lace
and tall against this clarity of Sierra Nevada sky. 

We’re not in Nevada but west, near Yosemite, 
east of the Sierra Madres at Shaver Lake 
where this tree has blown into the gnomon of a dial 

too big to easily tell time, except by the age 
of a tree, solitary, redolence defined by insistence
in a ground too unforgiving for others to survive. 

Silver granite and gray is broken by the musk 
trunk and up to the brilliant needle-tufted climax
and seed cones of each branching of the Blackjack, 

the Bull, the Yellow, the Ponderosa Pine 

until high above the weathered bark and white heartwood,
an extinguished match of charcoal, last trunk trails into cloud,
branches nude of seeds, of needles, a treble evidence of tree 

and lightning strike. Too tall is unsafe (as is too anything)
in a nature that diminishes even this stone mountain,
and nature’s God throws down holy fire to teach 

humility to a tree.