Hommage

I’ve been trying to write a poem about a saguaro cactus my whole life. She defies every attempt. Trying to capture her in words is like trying to get a good picture of the moon on an iPhone. There’s great reluctance by both parties to be pigeon holed, to be defined or held static. I get it.

It’s strange though, because the saguaro herself is made up of such poetic language— ribs, skeletons, thorns. She stands in the desert with an unparalelled majesty. She’s a queen. Her roots spread as wide as she is tall. Can you imagine? Yards and yards of roots creeping outward just inches beneath the dry, unforgiving desert earth— like tendriled divining rods. When the water comes, she swells and holds an ocean inside her.

When she dies, we call her carcass a fallen soldier. It lays in the desert for ages and ages until her bones are drug bare through the teeth of bugs, and licked clean by the sun. Ocassionally she dies standing stright up. Her flesh falls until she is just a holy frame. Even in death, she’s a commanding presence.

Her arms are magnificent. Sometimes she grows several. Sometimes they reach to the heavens. Sometimes right down at you. I saw one once whose arm twisted up and out and back around toward the ground, until it was eye level. She was in bloom, her round spikey fist full of white and yellow flowers. As if she were handing me a bouquet.

Lately I’ve been noticing how often saguaro’s are nestled in the branches of a mesquite tree. I’m sure there’s some biological reason for this— bird droppings from the tree seeding the ground below it or something. But the poet in me thinks it’s more than that. The poet in me wonders if this is the only time she is held. And I love that for her.

There’s a giant old girl on a dead-end road way out on the east side of town. When I was a kid, 16 or 17, I’d drive there after a night out when I wasnt ready to go home. I’d park beside her— sometimes just sit in my car next to her, sometimes laying on the hood looking up at the stars through her arms. She made me feel…hopeful. Or something like hopeful, anyway.

Five years ago when I moved back the the desert, I’d go to her on the full moon. Drive out and click my headlights off as I turned onto the dead-end. It was so bright, her enormous shadow fell across the empty road. Look at yourself, I’d say. Look at how gorgeous you are.

A couple months ago I went to see her. I hadn’t been in a while. Something didn’t feel right as soon as I turned onto the dead-end street. One of those fleeting moments that scrapes across your skin. The sky seemed different— the horizon off kilter. Something I couldn’t put my finger on.

As I got closer, I realized—  she was gone. Some part of me knew before I even got to her. The poet part of me, sensing the sky’s ache in the space she’d filled for more than 100 years. I got out of the car and mourned the sight of her body, in pieces on the desert floor. Bones sticking out of her decaying green flesh.

I picked up a small piece of her rib. It sat on my dresser with a collection of feathers and rocks I keep there like an altar. Four months later, I met a new friend and made her an offering from that rib, some copper wire, cotton twine, and 5 of the feathers. It hangs on the wall of her Liberty, MO home.

A few weeks ago, I got a call from a woman asking me to come out and take a look at a project she wanted done involving saguaro ribs. She wanted to use them to adorn a door she needed me to build for an old stone cottage on her property. I was intrigued, but also a little hesitant. I wanted to make sure the cactus hadn’t been illegally harvested. They hadn’t. They all came from her property and died of natural causes. She had 5 huge skeletons. Beautiful. Bones like teeth were all that remained after years and years of cremation in the desert heat.

I wanted the job. And, I was intimidated af. It meant I’d have to cut up the skeletons. I struggled with the thought. I put off giving her a quote for the job. I’d never done anything like this before. I’d spent most of my desert life carefully avoiding any contact with those sacred beings out of respect. The thought of cutting one up made my stomach feel sick.

One night while I was standing in my yard waiting for Riggs to finish sniffing and peeing so we could go to bed, I glanced up at the 40’ tall great-grandmother who stands like a sentry right outside my front door. She leans imperceptibly a little more every year, has an arm that’s broken and resting against another arm— both as thick as my torso. She’s in the embrace of a scrappy looking mesquite.

It wasn’t the first time I’d talked to her, but it was the first time I’d asked her for anything. I asked for her blessing. I asked if I could take her sisters. I promised to be an honorable steward to their bones, vowed to give them another life— one with as much beauty as I was capable of creating.

If she answered, I didn’t hear it, but I felt something click in my chest. The following day, I drove out and harvested 3 Sonoran queens, my heart in my throat. I really didn’t want to fuck this up. When I was done cutting, I loaded up the bones and took them home. The following morning, I got busy making good on my promise.

I sent some pictures of my progress to my new friend in MO. She said she loved that the cactus got to live another life as a door. A portal, she called it. Portal. Good god yes. Who doesn’t want to be a portal? Who doesn’t want to be a doorway to something expansive and mysterious and born again in the image of nothing containable or explainable?

Suddenly, I felt sanctioned by the saguaro gods. The design and the beauty came together in my mind. It all went from feeling terribly intimidating, to absolutely necessary.

***

All of this to say: To me, everything about a saguaro is a poem. But I’ll be damned if I can write one.

So, I built one instead.