Cowboy Problems

Does a tree know that it is a tree? Made of everything that makes it a tree? Does it know the name of its parts; from the roots, the trunk, the branches and the leaves to the door to Pooh’s house? Does it know separation? From other trees– from itself? From the light that ushers its expansion, the beards of moss that adorn it, the flower beds it shelters, the birds it hosts or the fruit it bears, in that otherwise unbearable cycle of eternal recurrence? 

Is it dogged by a rotten will to bend its arms at the thought of ‘being but a tree’? Does it know the word ‘but’, how lightly it is used or how it differs from the easily more advanced ‘butt’? Does it wish it were growing somewhere else, perhaps a place with gentler neighbours and less boring bugs with their bugging breaths which they get from boring? Does it know there is another place? And that if there isn’t, it’s not because the tree is idle or unmoved, but because it is here, and where else should it be?

When it stretches high and wide beyond itself to grab the sun but fails again, and the breeze pulsates against its bark-coated fingers, which are hoisted wildly as if to say ‘I am ‘butt’ a tree’, and nobody’s listening that could disagree – does it know how true it all is? 

To be at all is all there is.