PINE
Its fringy needles stiff
As
horsehair, glaucous, fine,
Form a kind of leaf;
Each leaf's a smaller branch,
Each branch a smaller tree,
The whole scaled to the inch,
The inch to infinity.
And so pine
is
what Plato
Might deem the universal
Universal, for
It
is
that metaphor
With roots in the divine:
The great in the small design.
A pair of winged seeds–
Each like a butterfly
With
wings
at the vertical,
Folded, at rest-can fly
Out over the world
And haul up in the sun
The bud and bone of pine.
Ecclesiastical,
Beautiful short or tall,
We cut it down. And yet,
Revenge is in its wit:
When we are cased in it,
There's pine to every fit.
Howard Moss
