On First Seeing a U.S. Forest Service Aerial Photo of Where I Live

All those poems I wrote About living in the sky Were wrong. I live on a leaf Of   a fern of   frost growing Up your bedroom window In forty below. I live on a needle of   a branch Of   a cedar tree, hard-bitten, Striving in six directions, Rooted in rock, a cedar Tree made of other trees, Not cedar but fir, Lodgepole, and blue spruce, Metastasizing like Bacteria to the fan- Lip of a draw to draw Water as soon as it slips From the snowdrift’s grip And flows downward from Branch to root — a tree Running in reverse. Or I live on a thorn on a trellis — Trained, restrained, maybe Cut back, to hold up Those flowers I’ve only heard of To whatever there is and isn’t Above.