What Do We Think Pines Want

January 30^th, 2011

That for what we want we pine?

Is it for the sky

That skinny trunks rise tall,

Or to catch much sun

Leaves cluster as needles,

Bunches to sweep it from the air?

Is it to hang soft and yellow jewelry from branches

That when washed or winded

Dust cars just cleaned

And clothes hung dry,

Or to transform its subsurface holdings

To tastes more liked by tap-long toes

By the soft falling of slender fingers?

The heart knows not what it wants

It just wants

And can be directed

Through ardent work,

Painful in the straightening,

To better things that take fulfilling light

Rather than others that would have it wanting

Aimless and desperate

Devoid of home

Lead senseless and voracious to an emptiness

Not seen on earth

Save in the lifeless eyes

Of the crooked lives and their darkest forms

Worse than those of the dead,

Lacking the certainty found in the end

Still maintaining dread.

We pine because we aspire

To vague inklings of what we might be,

To ourselves without limit,

Whereby some limit all others

To their own image

To take and abuse

In a fashion to present me as them.

The light that’s caught is first thinned,

Then disregarded;

Bunches that bind are broken apart.

In racing toward heights unknown

All roots are abandoned

Emaciating the model.

What’s left is mutilated,

Now marred and unfamiliar,

Lost is he who left

In devastation of his hands against his body

Used against others’ faces,

Their apparent truth obscured.

In his blind pain

He felled the pines,

The scene no different than the soil

Strength absconded in the falling.

It is not enough that rays abound

As light goes unseen

To the tired remains

Still staring up

Sitting under the last tree

Granting last light

In thickening shade.