"Tree Lights" explores issues of death and coping with loss. More importantly, though, this poem, fusing increasingly lucid elegiac stanzas with a free verse section, also shows the mind's attempt to reconcile the opposing forces of reason and intuition, logic and emotion. As mentioned above, this, along with "In My Grandmother's Gait," was a dual first place winner for poetry at the 1997 Sinclair Community College Contest, in Dayton, Ohio.