Cactus (September)

The weird cactus thing comes out in September: spongy diamonds, aeronautic globes, flash mobs. Who knows what. The Mexicans had a name for the weird one when their heads weren’t on fire. When they weren’t Mexicans but the Blood Dreamers of Higher Plateaux. Mexicans must think this is common as gumleaves. What’s the name of it, now that the nursery label has crumbled into plastic shards? The Mexicans probably have a name for it like The Tablet or The Spoon or Number Eight or Left Turn or Helicopter. All that time and secretly we still just think, you’re cactus. I mean, what? You are cactus. But isn’t that something you might want to be? Able to keep your reserves. Able to push forth the boundaries. Able to come out surprisingly well in season. Isn’t that an ingenious way to spend the time? Indifferent to the long hours of afternoon. Accustomed to cold evening or warm. Ready for the morning as you sit up and take notice. Would be a good idea. Stones that turn into bulging shrubs, sticks that take shape and balloon to fill the space, the soil that cracks up at some cosmic joke and cannot stop laughing green flesh. Where do they come from? And why do they sometimes become something we don’t want to know about? An overweight slob, a grotesque caricature, an utter prick? But I digress. Or rather, you are still reading. Attempts to categorise cactus are doomed to incompletion. Calculations of numbers are mistaken ventures. That they exist together with us and everything else between the watery blue above and the granite fires below, takes up so much of our writing time; and why, even more. Did they start in Patagonia and just move north? The word is not Mexican, it’s Greek. It drifts into usage on the Gulf Stream sometime after the invasions of the Americas. Maybe it’s Jacobean Greek, or what a Spaniard thought was an artichoke. Millions of them. Flowers pop out. Enough said.