Cactus Fruit (final)

A thing of curiosity
Which I’ve come to call mind
And play
Which I’ve come to call soul
A child
He approached the thorny reaches
of the cactus patch
Tiny cracked feet
Dusted red
Fragments of canyon walls
Taking flight and clinging
Onto one foot
And the other
His soft hands reaching
For drops of late summer suns
Caught and forgotten
Amongst her stinging needles.
Two steps closer.
Pricked
Three steps shuffling back
You could not have expected him, then
To have grasped the significance of the act
with
Hands too small to hold it
and
Skin too delicate to reconcile,
Hunger too deep to efface.
One foot.
The other.
I would come to you again
My mother
With hands that could uproot you
If gloved
But ungloved and bare I come
Naked in your dense spaces
Expecting lessons of thorns
But plunging within you
Finding myself pierced and bleeding.
My body confronted in reds and browns
My contortion pursuing your corruption
I wrenched her from your teeth
And knew her
In a moment
Flesh aching, Eyes watering, Feet blistered and cracked
I knew her
Delicate in my hand
Her torn flesh flashed as I had imagined it
But from it flowed not tears but water
And from her skin, not sweat but salt and scent
And in her movement existed not dance
But fiber and weight
And our lovemaking lay in your belly
Bloodied hands stretching upward
Offering silent prayers
Of wholeness:
Purple and red