From To a Blossoming Pear Tree (1977)
The brothers’ related banter…
J: Discoveries in Arizona, by James Wright. Bit of a longer short poem for today, Hank, but I thought you might like it because it’s got some nature in it, I know that you’re pro-nature.
H: You’re right, I did like it. It gave me goosebumps.
J: Ahohohoho! Wow! That’s a massive victory!
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Click to read poem
All my life so far
I have been afraid
Of cactus,
Spiders
Rattlesnakes.
The tall fourteen year old boy who led me through the desert whispered, “Come over this way.” Picking my steps carefully over an earth strangely familiar, I found four small holes, large enough for a root that might have been torn out or a black snake hole in Ohio, that I hated.
“What is it?” I said. “Some cute prairie dog or an abandoned post hole maybe?”
“No,” he said. “She’s down there with her children. She doesn’t hate you, she’s not afraid. She’s probably asleep, she’s probably keeping warm with something I don’t know about. And all I know is sometimes in sunlight, two brown legs reach out. It is hard to get a look at her face, even in the museum she turns away. I don’t know where she’s looking.”
“I have lived all my life in terror of a tarantula, and yet I have never even seen a tarantula turn her face away from me.”
“That’s alright,” said the boy. “Maybe she’s never seen you either.”
John Green Reads Poetry 