The next poem has a unintended pun in the title.
It's called, 'The Night Blooming Cereus' and that's not S-E-R
but C-E-R. It's a type of plant that grows in the desert
and around many people's houses.
It's-- I don't know exactly what it is botanically,
but it's a viny spiny sort of thing that grows under mesquite
trees.
Looks like a whole bunch of snakes with a thorns on it.
It has under the ground a large tuber
which used to be used for food, I've never eaten it,
but this is one of the things in the poem
that you might not know about.
'The Night Blooming Cereus.
Cowboys and Indians found them by smelling around at night,
because they grew deep in thickets.
Ate the moon of a tuber, like eating their own souls.
Our next door neighbor who we hardly know
comes knocking late, and we go fumbling over
stones around their husband's old paintings
to see it detached from its rotting room pole floating
in the flashlight around the garden.
Spend the rest of the night barefoot
on the warm patio telling jokes, drinking their good whiskey.
My whole life is a trance, I hope
to break from once or twice a year.