You: bristlecone pine. Later, checking my phone:
Pinus longaeva. Western. Intermountain. I knew you as “Great Basin.” What are you doing here?

It is you: needles bundled in fives. Characteristically gnarled. Weathered. Stout.

High above Price Canyon. Seven, eight thousand feet above the sea. Plateau. Old growth pine. Wind whipping.

Speckled rock against ribboned trunk. Inanimate and once-animate. Merged with time. Over time. Coexisting. Bare bones and alive. Finding a way to live. To thrive. Fully alive or just hanging on? Rooted —

A place, at times, inhospitable. But home. Hundreds of years. For a thousand years. A sometimes neighbor, a good neighbor. Vulnerable to fire. A fire, they say, that is imminent. You belong here. You are what here is. What am I doing here?