Hemlocks in tiers lean
into the oblique light of late afternoon
facing Chittenden Peak down the lake shore—
their last hour till the sun
passes behind it, as it has already here.
Their shelving sprays capture the molten glare
and relay it,
silvered needles bristle at attention,
an array of lenses
kept in alignment with its shifting
angle of incidence
by spontaneous minute recalibrations.
It must be the sap
that lets their faces shine like mirrors, keen
to lick up every drop of solar honey.
There are no accidents.
Anaximander says all things in heaven and earth
as they are born and perish
pay each other reckoning and recompense
for trespass into being. It’s the beginning
of the physics of cause and effect and
of the conservation of energy.
Nature’s books balance a
retributive necessity’s arithmetic
of getting back at
and getting even, matching forces in
an economy of war: one man’s loss
is another man’s gain,
one man’s joy is another man’s pain
as reckoned by the artificial scarcity
of fictitious tickets
under a certain strain of thought, a stain of mind.
But the solar source
squanders its largesse of honey gold
in a perennial jubilee
of superabundance, debt-free every day,
outpour unstinting over blue-green needles—
half-round, flattened,
keeled, concave: open-clustered on short stocks
spirally arranged 
in a star around the axis of the shoot,
they reach spindle-fingered 
hieroglyphic hands to meet
the shower of rays.
They do not inhabit a closed system.
The door is open.