The pine thrusts itself right through the branches
Of the straight slower-growing sweetgum
Deaf to the suit for peace
Bending and striving to achieve the light and winning

Trees do what they do
Fruit kernel pod and tang
They don’t put too much thought into it
They can’t help it if a sweetgum gets in the way

Too fast and too slow for dull-witted perception
One character yoked in conflict with one other one
The serene aggressor the serene victim
No gathering momentum or dissipant entropy

So no we need not pick at the memory
Of the originary primal trauma
No obscure onset no indistinct outcome
No finale no particular overture

No heroes aloft in their fragile balloons
No perpetrators brandishing their arcane munitions
No saints bestowing their tender succor
No busted gamblers cursing their losing hands

No tree of knowledge tree of life
No quick crisis or languid denouement
The pine twists into a question mark
The least bad answer triumphant death

The pine neither demands nor assumes an answer
Straining in patient striving
One dead limb hanging idly
Lichens festooning its powdery skin

The sweetgum does not sue for peace
But exercises a subatomic mutuality
Or subsubatomic or suprauniversal
Careless of the epiphenomena of life and death

The same strive energy that drives the pine
Sameness not to be misconstrued as oneness
Where does that tree begin and end
The miracle of stoma the mystery of root hair

Nothing is separate
There is no one to remain
There are no many to change and pass
All is flux without monads swept in flux

Only the illusion of individuality
Only the illusion of objecthood
Makes no feel like denial
Makes empty feel like deprivation

Only the self-serving narrative of oneself
Only the faulty grammatical dilemma
Of singular and plural
And what is the number of zero

Hail world without things
Life without a self
Life without life
Being without being

It stops with zero no more than with one
Nor rigid needle nor trembling leaf
The sweetgum also pierces the pine
Nor outside nor inside but through and through