That particular silver light slanting
off the aspen leaves, evoking olive
groves rinsed in Iberian sunlight and
spread out to dry against the windy frame
of plowed red fields, utterly out of place
in the subarctic, is left in the wake
of leaf miners scraping meals from the green
of whole groves and hills, weakening the trees
over years, sapping deeply stored sugars.
Farther south the beetle-killed spruce are red
across the slopes; as it warms they’ll move north.
My daughter may live to see the new trees
move in, leaf, needle, and bole, remaking
the light and the shape of the sky at dusk.
