North Sonoran, Year’s End
Beehive, pincushion, prickly
pear, teddybear. Fuzzes
and needles against a rockscape
so bizarre, I thought
at first, in my sleeplessness,
I might’ve hallucinated
all of it: fraggle-like plants,
blue smudge of mountains.
It was a rough year,
the kind that leaves
you looking hard
at saguaros, their bodies
seeming to say, I know
how to outlast
a century and need
next to nothing.
Maybe it’s a myth,
not needing. We pass
dead ones whittled
down to wooden ribs,
struts and braces
like a violin or guitar’s
interior. I forgot
it was possible,
this raw sort
of elegance. These days
I walk encumbered,
shoulder a diaper bag,
tiny clothes. Twenty-something
me looks on in the dark
somewhere, embarrassed by excess.
It took hours to prepare
for this austerity, desert
where rock slopes
are flush against
the succulents’ sexed geometries,
the sky open all around us,
its silence like a hem
let out suddenly.
When I say no sound,
I don’t mean the quiet
we often speak of:
not white noise
back east, deciduous chatter
and swish. I mean how air
can somehow cease
to be fluid. The hyle sheared
down to nothing,
the borders thin, then vanish.
Good days, I can imagine
myself like this:
slowly weathered into
something less me,
what sounds like being erased
but is also less ego, less belief,
elemental and unarmed,
riding only the real
minute in front of me.
Other days, I just think:
exhausted. A rough year,
though I can’t claim
there’s no one
to show for it. I carry him
now on my back,
this terrain too rocky
for strollers.
He has just discovered
his shadow, the not-him
that must follow
wherever he goes,
a kind of reverse mirror,
so opaque in its past
understanding. He talks
back to it
and to rocks, to cacti, to sky,
ah-die-die-die-die,
his new voice
like the pink quartz
which nearly turns
my ankle on the path,
the consequences of falling
greater now because
I hold someone else.
Ah die die die
he insists, looking up
at the saguaros,
the live ones
who, for so long, hold on
to their ribbed green,
deep and secret
stores of water.
Who start as a spear
and might still morph,
much later in life,
into something
with many arms. Whose
split fruit — clotted,
blood-colored — keeps
reminding me of
our only possible route,
the hard way
I watched him first arrive.
* * * * *
Man o’ War
Freak show of the feminine,
too irregular to be named
galleon or bluebottle,
you’re the afterbirth
propelled by mood & current,
about as unreliable
as it gets. Can’t fit in
a hidey-hole. Washed-up
on the beach, we cringe
at your gelatinous bloat,
the raggedy beard down below.
(Hundreds of mouths
is what I heard.)
Tentacles tangle themselves,
the longest one hot & coiled
like the blue telephone
I’d stretch from kitchen to stairwell,
mean girl on the line
baiting me to talk shit
about another. Seconds later,
that girl revealed herself,
listening in secret.
Three-way call! Her voice
wavered, as if electricity
had just passed through.
Stunned, I’d start to apologize,
but too late. She’d heard
my ugliest version:
a truth at least half-
opaque, too slimy and purple
to reveal character. Whose
shame reached the deepest?
They’d lured me in, knowing
I’d fall in easy — too eager
to be liked, starved
for any camaraderie —
knowing all along
how hated myself
& now everyone else
had due reason. O the hideousness
we felt destined to become,
bitch of the cruel high
seas. Sail full of hot air,
each desperate line is
studded with sting.