New Year’s Morning

Southeast of Taos, North of the Red River, on a ridge nobody visits, stands a frutescent

Pinyon Pine casting the universe’s only perfect shade just after sunrise each New Year’s morning.

It has painstakingly arranged each cone and needle to bestow a laser-sharp ellipse of squint-less grey.

This tree knows the past; ancestral jet-stream travels scented with far away spices,

and wonders if its progeny will ever understand its desire to provide perfect shade.

It feels peace not knowing the future but proud of its New Year’s Day gift.

The sun longs to touch the ground near the base of the tree and each year tries

in vain to create some wind, a wildfire or an internal flare to the right.

The sun does not understand mortality, nor the Pinyon’s peace of accomplishment.

Beneath the tree is buried a nomad.

The tree struggles to imagine a path chosen,

but offers the annual gift of this moment

anyway.