the word tree

The peony buds swelled for days as the ants unfastened the blooms now a shower has left them lying open in the grass.

If I buy you a card with a picture of a door will you understand?

I am trying to think of a hundred words for this summer wind against my skin.

So far, the card is blank inside. A white sheet hanging in a rainstorm.

You’re going to walk around the corner.

When you see me, look surprised

and throw down your suitcases, like this.

Run with arms open, yes.

Right here we’ll hug. No, not yet.

You will look very happy, like this.

Love Poem for People Who Hate Themselves: Folk Tale

I ran down the highway’s yellow lines in my sleep last night. When I woke up, your skin was a desert with no oasis. When I was a boy, the crack of the barber strap used to wake me up, but someone stole it and threw it on the roof of the Brown & Jewel. My mother said my father lost his paycheck in a poker game and came home and cried at her feet. I colored eggs that Easter like a fool. I fed a horse some grass and another boy lost his finger. The Lord works in mysterious ways, but it all adds up. Once I dreamed the ace of spades was a dagger. -- Love Poem for People Who Hate Themselves: Like Any Other Planet

I knew your zip code. I saw Austin and I liked it. I stood outside the 7-11, shirtless, drinking alone. I could go as far as any other man, though my conveyances were limited to public means of transportation. Sometimes it was light and sometimes it was dark. You know, good days, bad days. I saw the desert through the window of a Greyhound bus. It looked like any other planet where pain is the only feeling, but there were cacti blooming some kind of flower that may have been pink. Do you believe me? I opened a book to make an impression, but no one took a glance. The seat beside me was always empty. The driver never stopped. I always thought he was headed your way. --

Love Poem for People Who Hate Themselves: The Ruckus

I saw the ghost and the ghost’s shadow, but never did I see the dead man who made them. I didn’t believe in the family curse or the vengeful God. I knew my way past the swamp at night with my eyes closed. I was chased by the one they call The Ruckus, but I’ve never been caught yet. I rode my bike when I heard the siren and saw a man lifted up by a front loader from his accidental grave. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a soul, but he didn’t have one. I walked through long grasses with Ronnie and watched his brother shoot him with a flaming arrow. You could grow potatoes in his ears, they said. He learned to play the drums and drowned in the reservoir at sixteen. Now he’s throwing snowballs at cars in Hell. The Ruckus beats his ass for eternity. Can’t say about Heaven. That place caters to a different sort.

--

Love Poem for People Who Hate Themselves: Quarantine

Last night the apple trees shook and gave each lettuce a heart

Six hard red apples broke through the greenhouse glass and

Landed in the middle of those ever-so-slightly green leaves

That seem no mix of seeds and soil but of pastels and light and

Chalk x’s mark our oaks that are supposed to be cut down   

I’ve seen the neighbors frown when they look over the fence

And see our espalier pear trees bowing out of shape I did like that

They looked like candelabras against the wall but what’s the sense

In swooning over pruning I said as much to Mrs. Jones and I swear

She threw her cane at me and walked off down the street without

It has always puzzled me that people coo over bonsai trees when

You can squint your eyes and shrink anything without much of   

A struggle ensued with some starlings and the strawberry nets

So after untangling the two I took the nets off and watched birds

With red beaks fly by all morning at the window I reread your letter

About how the castles you flew over made crenellated shadows on   

The water in the rainbarrel has overflowed and made a small swamp

I think the potatoes might turn out slightly damp don’t worry

If there is no fog on the day you come home I will build a bonfire

So the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them

Terry looked at me. He said: “Do not underestimate this anger. This anger was the engine that powered Good Omens.” I thought of the driven way that Terry wrote, and of the way that he drove the rest of us with him, and I knew that he was right.

There is a fury to Terry Pratchett’s writing: it’s the fury that was the engine that powered Discworld. It’s also the anger at the headmaster who would decide that six-year-old Terry Pratchett would never be smart enough for the 11-plus; anger at pompous critics, and at those who think serious is the opposite of funny; anger at his early American publishers who could not bring his books out successfully.

The anger is always there, an engine that drives. By the time Terry learned he had a rare, early onset form of Alzheimer’s, the targets of his fury changed: he was angry with his brain and his genetics and, more than these, furious at a country that would not permit him (or others in a similarly intolerable situation) to choose the manner and the time of their passing.

And that anger, it seems to me, is about Terry’s underlying sense of what is fair and what is not. It is that sense of fairness that underlies Terry’s work and his writing, and it’s what drove him from school to journalism to the press office of the SouthWestern Electricity Board to the position of being one of the best-loved and bestselling writers in the world.

...

Terry’s authorial voice is always Terry’s: genial, informed, sensible, drily amused. I suppose that, if you look quickly and are not paying attention, you might, perhaps, mistake it for jolly. But beneath any jollity there is a foundation of fury. Terry Pratchett is not one to go gentle into any night, good or otherwise.

He will rage, as he leaves, against so many things: stupidity, injustice, human foolishness and shortsightedness, not just the dying of the light. And, hand in hand with the anger, like an angel and a demon walking into the sunset, there is love: for human beings, in all our fallibility; for treasured objects; for stories; and ultimately and in all things, love for human dignity.

Or to put it another way, anger is the engine that drives him, but it is the greatness of spirit that deploys that anger on the side of the angels, or better yet for all of us, the orangutans.