Thanks for the reference to Vaughan, Paul Breslin, and for the contemporary Buddhist take on this poem – for the fresh perspective.

Church Monuments makes, as RP says, an incomparable exemplar of the poetic force of syntax -- expository, analytic, kinetic -- and so stripped down that it can leave an allusive impress on as bare a phrase as "which also".

RATES OF COMBUSTION


The air thins and clears
above eight thousand feet and distances
draw nearer: a silver pine snag
falls in the forest and over decades
disintegrates

as layer under layer
the rings of yearly growth break down in fragments,
the fat years and the lean,
fissure and crumble slowly inward
toward heartwood

which also crumbles, fracturing
beneath the pry and wedge of ice and insects,
snow, sunlight, rain,
the slow combustion of decay,
till all that's left

where the thick trunk lay
is a long strip of woodchips making a path
through the encroaching brush,
a strew of cubic segments the size
of fingerbones,

the ridges of the grain
still visible on their striated faces
of burnished muted copper.
Come evening, a fading bed
of coals gives back

that brazen tarnished glow
below a grill of gaping rainbow trout
— the trout we feast on fattened
on mosquitoes that swarm at dusk
to feed on us.


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