Sugar Maples, January

What years of weather did to branch and bough
No canopy of shadow covers now,

And these great trunks, when the wind's rough and bleak,
Though little shaken, can be heard to creak.

It is not time, as yet, for rising sap
And hammered spiles.  There's nothing there to tap.

For now, the long blue shadows of these trees
Stretch out upon the snow, and are at ease.

Richard Wilbur 
(originally printed in the New Yorker, collected in The Best American Poetry 2013)