Limber Lost

This fish knew

exactly how I felt.

By the time I had gotten

to the Sonora Desert Museum,

I was ready to lie me down on a limb

and order a cup of ice cream

so I did.  

Mari belongs to one of those book clubs--

you know what I mean--in which you read a book

but then have to go and talk about it as if

you were trying to avoid the pleasure of 

living in the author's imagination

instead of your own pedestrian plodding.  

I had decided to live in the pleasure of my own plodding,

so after lunch with Mari, I fueled the pickup and did

what Horace Greeley had suggested, and went west,

north of Saguaro West, and staged a surprise attack on it

from the northwest side of it, where no one in the civilized world

realized human beings had ever gone before.

A pinto prisoner did see me come by,

and you can see by his astonishment

that he wondered why I was not wearing Spanish regalia, or buckskins.

He, or she, or it, was for show, I think.

The buggy was for show, for sure.

And then I realized that,

like book clubs,

there were worlds of people

in places I had supposed uninhabited

who had abandoned their buggies

and aluminum conestogas

and then just stayed there and read books

and listened to a cosmos of AM radio preachers

broadcasting from St. Louis or Amarillo.

I did not, as a social scientist might have,

knock on doors and ask questions:  

I left them to their pintos and preachers.

(I did have the radio on, as you have surmised,

until I finally gave it rest from frantic searching.)

I found Saguaro West

by turning always to deeper forests

of saguaros.  And there it was,

and there they were,  doing what is absurd, 

creating delicate, white blossoms

at the end of their prickly arms.

And heads.

My long-time migratory plans
finally brought me to the Desert Museum,
where I saw that fish.

Do not ask me what it is:
I do not know.  It looked as if
it had been to a book club meeting
without having read the book.

It had been my intent to stroll
to the hummingbird house
but I yielded early and easily,
and bought a cup of ice cream instead,
and watched the wind put a windrow
of trees through physical therapy.
I braced myself against the table leg,
having no intention of bending.

When Mari called,
book club done and me still gone,
I assured her that I was just resting
on an underwater branch
and would be home soon.