Immoral Ponderosa

"Amoral" or "indifferent"
Would probably be better words
To carve the ethics of this tree,
Properly, into human terms.

Somehow, "immoral" feels better,
One more anthropic projection
Flickering over the immune
Green of this avatar of pine.

Its isolation draws the eye,
Gives it a private character,
Removed from the sprawling forest,
Equally green and amoral,

That covers steep slopes below it,
Despite the fact that character,
As the eye and its mind well know,
Has nothing to do with a pine,

Everything to do with the eye
And its mind caught on pine branches,
Dendritic mirrors of dendrites,
Entangled memories that like

Similes cut to metaphors,
Life, knowledge, good, and evil shorn,
Hacked, split, stripped of complications,
Sanded down for home furnishings,

This comfortable bench and rocker
Under the beams of this ceiling,
Under this cedar-shingled roof,
Where a rolled-pulp sheet of paper

Serves as the eye's construction site,
Snowed imagination's playground,
Space to defy the tree of time
By sketching that pen-and-ink mind.