The Sunrise Tree

The sun each morning ratchets
Up the pine tree in my yard.
Like a slow fire bear it grows
Upward, limb by limb, severing
Each branch at the trunk
With starts of invisibility.
It must then reweld them back
To pass upward to the next.

Over breakfast I witness
The electrocution of air:
The invisible law of visibility
That follows the fishbone arrow up
To find its place among the planets.
Too brilliant for a color,
This is a hole of sheer power that
Sculptures colors from my darkness.

Searing off needles and cones, it
Silently absorbs them into itself,
Renders the skeleton trunk black.
But as I close my eyes, that
Which in nature is black,
Burns green, and when the sun
Clears the arrowpoint pinnacle,
I can return the green

From its storage in the cool
Eye fluids to the tree. Absorption
By the sun is an act of love,
You see, and the difference between
Its tender atomic destruction
Of my tree each morning and, say,
Nagasaki, is the distance
Between the stars and me.