Cacti

The cacti begin as a small, innocuous bump 

in a blue, clay-filled window pot, 

a stub of needles clinging to my thumb.  

I itch, but the stub grows tubular, multiple – 

plant and plant again, columns 

of cacti contending, so I move them out

onto backyard space.  Sticklers, spines, 

succulents of cacti – I struggle 

for a collective noun to feel at home with, 

but now there’s not enough room 

to read beyond words into the deeper dark,  

and forty years have turned.

Still, I go each night to dream 

the romance of aloneness under the moon, 

in Arizona or New Mexico 

composing a poem.  But though the cacti

stand sentinel – tall saguaros, 

one with pincushion face and chubby arms 

held in spiky vigour up; another 

a broken-crested, bare-ribbed wicker man; 

a third opening its pale, sturdy petals 

to the bat – whatever I seek 

eludes me here.  The darkness eavesdrops 

on my contemplation.  Everything 

stays ridged, sealed, resiliently pneumatic. 

Night after night, I come to 

or from language, heedless that the forfeit 

is my lover’s absence, even as I celebrate

the sound of her voice, 

the curve of her haunch, her sleep’s rhythm.