A life of silence and solitude, the story of the Saguaro.
We are beings of the Southwest. Not known to the North, stranger to the far South and
unimaginable to the East.
Humans will never be capable of such solitude. I’ll stand alone, rooted in Earth, fixed
under the sun’s heat casting a shadow across the brown desert flat like a sundial.
People have past in moments, while I’ve stayed for near a hundred years, here, in the
same spot of my sprouting and the same spot of my death.
It is here where I differ from the human beings passing in moments.
It is here where we connect through arms, spines, ribs, roots.
It is here where I’ve lived through sunrise and set stemmed to grow in solitude.
I am one with you; lost in some form of perpetuity. You move through yours, while I
remain to
grow upon what I am.
The building of one space in time for my entire existence.
Some will see me for my towering effect.
Some will see me for my soft skin under protruding spikes.
Some will see me for what I have seen.
What has passed before me in the same spot.
What years have changed in my appearance and understanding.
We both feel temptation to touch each other.
Pain will only come of this interaction.
I see how you wrap one another in embrace.
I wish to do the same, yet know how piercing my touch can be.
So I’ve learned to abandon my desires to touch, withhold the craving for another.
Arms reaching up in hope of catching the feeling of the air between the clustered spines
stemming
out of my water-soaked skin.
Flesh we both possess and protect, from what?
My kind, too, has marked this Earth with our presence.
Hundreds of years have we been here before
This land was “yours”.
But I have no mouth to tell of history.
I have no legs to run away late in the night.
No bed to sleep in. No lover.
Just change in desert skies, used under the light of day.
Though our lives vary through movement, time and experience, we share similar
concerns.
I too know what it means to be used.
I’ve been sought after for shelter.
Drilled into by nameless creatures day and night.
Left alone in a dark patch of night without a word of goodbye spoken.
Just as I have been used in the dark patches of night, so have you.
I see you stare at me reaching up for nothing.
You’ve given me the chance to stare back.
I wonder of what it’s like to have moving arms.
I want to embrace anything.
I have seen the look of wanting to feel embraced in your stare.
I wish I could be the one to provide.
I can feel your voice as a bellowing echo through my ribs, shaping the trunk of my body.
Just as you call out into the night, I wish to do the same.
Attempts to exclaim, to let my place not be forgotten.
But there is no sound, and I stand alone waiting for your return so we can stare again at
one another and discover more about ourselves through what we see in each other.
We are both victims of evils, hexed by fate.
I am to be rooted in silence and you are to be rooted in a misunderstood existence,
escaping to
find the solitude I wish so deeply to rid from my life.
Your life isn’t long enough to imagine solitude of this length.
Slow in growth, silent professions, or more simply, one of the rest, not to stand out to the
world
as I stand out to you.
No other being has given me this attention to distract from my true seclusion.
Your stopping by is something I appreciate, yet can’t express.
Nor can I express my wanting for the freedom you have.
You come to find me in the same spot as I’ve been since I began this sequestered journey.
But you wonder of what I feel about the permanence among the rock and creosote, lashed
under the force of monsoons, from a hundred years ago until now, all the same.
Left to be forgotten by your visits, to fall back to the desert ground I came from, to
become a
hollowed-out skeleton that stood through your life and a lifetime before.
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