Listening for Cactus invites us to embrace the book as a body of poetry – not simply to see or hear words bound together in a book but to touch (and be touched by) poems neither can contain, poems that cannot be contained. The juxtaposition of the visual image on the cover with the first title page in braille reminds us that there is more to vision than meets the eye and offers a taste of what the poet has in mind when she writes (in “Reading Braille,” p.72) of reading until her “fingers were raw” and being alone with her hands. In the title poem, she writes, alone, with her hands (p.75) “I have always listened for the sound at the end of silence, / the notes after the piece ends…” And when she puts her ear on the earth, she listens for vibrations. She is not alone. Hearing, waiting to be touched, makes the poem, a work of the hands, an experience of the whole body.

From “Chinese Woman Smoking” (p.10) through “To Think about Tiredness You Have to Let Yourself Go Underground” (p.51) and “A Spell for My Sisters in Bosnia” (p.80) – from beginning to end – this is a gathering of wise women whose wisdom lies in the creative tension between waiting – being still and knowing – and not knowing when to stop, not knowing how to stop, not being able to stop: “…I do what I do / because there may not be a tomorrow / I remember how it was in a dream / where I rode Joan of Arc’s horse / until it turned to skin and bones / and wouldn’t get up again, no matter // how long I cried, / and pulled on its rope / and spoke to it in halting French” (p.31). I cannot read that without hearing Toni Morrison’s Baby Suggs, another wise woman whose wisdom lies in the explosive tension of knowing not knowing when to stop, both as a “holy” person moved to witness and as a witness who knew there were no words for the horror. The questions of the “Chinese Woman Smoking” (pp.10,11) permeate the whole collection “…What difference will it make // if there’s one less child in the world?” and “What difference does anything make?”

The next poem, “Isadora Speaking” (p.12), answers “Sing to them she’s gone now, she’s left nothing / but wild and extravagent movements to her friends…” Nothing matters, and the poem is evidence that Isadora, gone, still moves. And the next, “Moon Flowers (for Joy Harjo)” (p.13), with its “Tell me…” at the beginning of each stanza except the one that begins with “Describe…” knows that what matters is not the fact of a dream alone but the act of telling. “I want to know what else you forgot that day,” the poet writes after the poem has spun for some time around people “uneasy / because of the moon’s presence” and hearing “the nasal, mid-western voice of the radio / announcer saying it has been reported by reliable sources / that the moon has been missing from the sky / for the past several hours.” The power lies in the presence of the moon’s absence from the sky “and what your friends said to you when you told them / last night I dreamed / that the moon and I were drinking whiskey together / and that we told each other / dozens and dozens of white lies.” One way or another, between friends, the power lies in being spirit filled: “Under my stick, / the cholla makes tuneless tunes, // a musical instrument from the moon. / Listening for cactus was a little like looking for God // when I was fifteen, / like looking for a good lover when I was twenty-one” (p.75).

What a marvelous riddle that is – how is listening for cactus like looking for God (or “a good lover”)? Listening looking still moving, these poems have the power to surprise, and, coming from a poet who cannot stop, who wants to write “so fast I can’t read any of it,” that gives us pause.

The poet’s eyes speak in “From My Eyes” (pp.38,39): “we have given you what we could,” all one can expect from any eye. They “sing… in a language of missing dots.” They are “the deserted, the desert parts of you / that will not bloom until another lifetime – / it will take some kind of Hopi spiritual dry farming / for us to sprout images. // we’ll come back as feathers, / lizards or a swamp lily; / you’ll come back as antennae, / salt, or leftover uranium. // there’s nothing wrong with us / that a little time outside the body and another lifetime / on this earth won’t cure; / next time around, we won’t be connected: // another woman, a woman other than yourself, / will see the moon from the bottom of the arroyo / and weep at the beauty of the light; / she will not stop to think about her eyes.”

The last of the five sections in this collection is titled “Spells,” making the magic in all five sections explicit. That woman other than yourself who will not stop to think will see, will weep. It begins with haiku (p.82) and the singular power of metaphor: “Over the pine trees / those solitary ravens / are shafts of black silk.” It continues with “Our First House” (p.83): “let’s build here.” Simple, direct – “we’ll watch the moon we’ll / walk along the Animas collecting wood / we’ll lie in dry leaves / dreaming that a sadness wonderful as mountains / is floating and brooding over our land / turning us gray and silver as old logs.” There is an echo here of “The Dead Will Giggle” (p.24): “If there’s no cure for depression, / I know there is also no end to the purple flowers / that will bloom next September / along the access roads off of Route 14; / in mid-October, there are still a few of them left. / I will go out onto the porch and start listening for the dead.”

And, the poet’s leprechaun self says, “the dead will giggle at you when you suffer too much.” So much depends on knowing what is too much, and that knowing (again bringing Baby Suggs to mind) is the power at the heart of the spells, as in “A Spell for My Sisters in Bosnia” (p.86), which begins with “There will be no more rapes.” It ends with “no more soldiers dragging a woman to their general, / and because she is still speaking from her own power, / she asks the general, would you rape your sister, / if I were your sister, would you rape me? – / and he releases her // There will be no more generals. / There will be no more soldiers. / There will be no more politicians, / no more oceans full of oil, / no more grapes full of pesticides, / no more men who are powerless, no more men who are angry, no more men who are angry.” It ends with a woman still speaking from her own power, “no more” eight times in the last stanza. Power comes to rest in a woman – still – speaking from her own power, repeating “no more men who are angry, / no more men who are angry.” And, finally (in “Returning,” pp. 93,94), words for “the young child who was left behind”: “let’s stay in the world for the hummingbirds, / for eggs and apples and friends we might make, / for the stories we will tell, and the stones we will hold. / I am here with you, / and I won’t forget you.”

When a poet gives me one of his or her own books, I am touched, and my favorite part of any festival is when we put our books in each other’s hands. But when a poet I know gives me another poet’s book and urges me to read it, that is the book that goes to the top of my list of books to read. Elizabeth Raby put Listening for Cactus in my hands, and I am grateful. Now I am putting it in yours. Please read it.

Reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Mary McGinnis. Listening for Cactus. Sherman Asher Publishing, 1996. ISBN 0-9644196-4-5.