Sequia sempervirens

The lexicographer who writes the trail
takes everything into the lexicon.
Everything. Manzanita, laurel, shale,

dust, angle of repose, fog, steelhead spawn,
arboreal salamander, windshear, salt,
temblor. The words are how the maps are drawn;

the sere earth, scriven, detailed to a fault.
And what to make of you but everything,
you formalist, you scholar of gestalt

psychology? One day we’ll read you ring
by ring, old vapor-drinker, as you now
read us (“Here I was born. Here, I die.”). Bring

the whole world into wholeness: one somehow
must honor the parts, but not at the expense
of the big picture, naturally. The bough

is the tree. The mental laws that run the sense
game—Law of Common Fate, of Symmetry,
of Prägnanz, which is pithiness—intense

enough in their individuality,
take on in their conjunction such a heft
they can’t be argued with. It’s hard to see

the tree for all that forest. One is left
feeling both miniscule and massive, part
of some vast commonality bereft

of specificities. And at its heart
is something reified; the rays of light
so columnar between the trunks you start

imagining tree and light reversing, bright
branch, dark air. This is a system that the mind
enacts at any scale. And it’s insight

that shows us what is outside. How we find
its inner, personal meaning—well, that takes
tools. Everything connects, though one is blind

to it most of the time. No: rather, one mistakes
for several things a singularity:
the grove has one root system. Each tree makes

a case for individuality,
but dig deep: it recants it, without fail.
What is is more, and less, than what we see.