With all your science can you tell how it is,

and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?

       - Henry David Thoreau

I had not intended to stay this long, not trusting

My long way back in the dark, but I am held here

In dusk quiet and the setting sun slowly climbing

The trunks of two pines so close and entwined

They are a single inseparable presence, its bark

Flickering and then flaming along the lower limbs

Where boughs of brown winter needles still stay,

Light emanating from them as though they were

Not merely reflection but the source of it, now

Guttering in an earthy incense haze, until only 

The tips of the topmost branches, the last of

Last year's dark cones, the green buds of the new

Ones, are all touching, reaching out to take it in,

Holding it and letting it go on into the still air,

And suddenly I know: there, that's how it happens!