The Ponderosa Pines hunched ponderously,

Their convoluted gestures frozen

With dry, rasping limbs in stages of vexation

And narrow forearms lifted high

In savored moments of exalted epiphany.

My brother and I climbed the questions

They grew,

Our legs crouching and stretching

Over the contours of perplexity,

Kindling a childhood

On the green-laced vertebrae

Of New Mexico’s greatest fire hazard.

Our favored climbing tree

Was too close to civilization’s adobe friction

For the firemen to let Him stay.

Perhaps He was too curious, too willing to lend His

Far-sighted perch

To inquisitive children—

Those that smashed rocks in search

Of pieces of the moon.

His lowest plateau,

A place of triumph, regardless,

Bled orange one day,

And the pigment brushed my flushed cheeks with discord.

This orange rot was a sickness spread from mankind,

A mark

For the brow of the doomed.

So we set upon fate with man’s finest scalpel,

Our father’s ax,

And it was fearful doctors that then sculpted their patient,

Heavy-handed in their love

And heady with the role of a savior.

Sepia bark gleamed metallically with sap

Where the incisions lay,

Fly eyes made of a hacked and honeycombed trunk,

That saw nothing.

And the men finished off this crippled love

With blunter and bigger saws,

And all that remained of a once beautiful

Climbing tree

Was a bit of orange spray-paint—

A tombstone scrawled hastily

Over the true victim of fire.