The long light comes green and red streaming

from the fire’s halo setting

leaf and needle into crisp

fullness filling and readying

for night’s drainpipe blackness. I

 

see now the fire in the yellow-red bark

blazing upward to paintbrush

washing wild fire strokes

painting and erasing canvases of sky

so low it falls heavy around limbs and

middle leaves, covering

 

half the trees in shade, shadowing

now what will all be blackened

come nightfall. I

 

stare at the top half and wait

for the purity of color that comes

only at twilight and dawn

when the angle fails, or succeeds,

and light lights each electron

in the skeleton of the forest.

 

Sometimes

I am lit like that

I like to think.