Here’s the full package for “I Was Once a Tumbleweed”:

ACF CONTENT

SUMMARY

Date 05-19-26

Title I Was Once a Tumbleweed / Breathing in the Same Roadside Ditch

Topic A poem framed by the speaker’s prose admission that today he is a jumbled prickly mess in the ditch, and consisting of a sustained tumbleweed self-portrait: wind-born and prodded by cactus thorns of past failures, ditched in roadside dust until a spark arrives in the form of the Muse’s rare desert bloom, the encounter bursting into flame, the speaker’s young tumbleweed self now just a memory, the present moment finding him beside her in the same roadside ditch, breathing.

Summary The framing preamble is the catalog’s most candid scene-setting in months. “After today / I’m a jumbled / prickly mess: / (In the ditch).” The parenthetical “(In the ditch)” is the poem’s most useful single phrase: the speaker is naming his current location, and the location is below the road, in the place where things land when they have rolled off the surface of life. The framing primes the reader for the poem proper, which will collect what’s in the ditch and make sense of it.

“Just because I’m old / doesn’t mean I can’t / write young thoughts” is the speaker’s preface to himself. The line carries the catalog’s recurring argument that age does not foreclose anything the spirit can still produce. He is warning the reader (or the Muse, or himself) that what follows will not be a senior’s poem about the past; it will be a current one.

The poem proper opens with the wind-blown self-portrait. “Wandering life’s vast treeless plain / in grit’s wind-born rasp and shiver” places the speaker on the high desert plain where tumbleweeds are made. The grit is in the air; the rasp is what the body sounds like as it’s tossed; the shiver is what it feels like to be tossed. Three sensory registers in two lines, all of them documenting the same condition: a body too dry and too light to stay where it lands.

“The cactus thorns / of past failures / prod my drifting limbs / as I tumble hither and yon” is the poem’s most efficient self-accounting. Past failures are rendered as cactus thorns, the kind of small sharp pains that don’t kill but don’t release. The thorns prod the drifting limbs, which means the failures don’t stop the drift; they only make it uncomfortable. The catalog has been making versions of this argument in the prison-of-his-own-making register, and here the same self-accounting is delivered through botanical fact.

The “lonesome tumbleweeds / clumped together / tangled / on the side of a dirt road” stanza is the poem’s quietest sociological observation. Tumbleweeds, by nature, are solitary; they collect at roadside fences and gather not by intention but by physics. Their clumping is not community; it is accumulation. The speaker is admitting that whatever proximity he had to other drifters was the proximity of things blown to the same fence, not the proximity of chosen relation.

“Only needing a spark— / to bump into… / a desire’s chance breath / your rare desert bloom, / a flame of burning red in the desert sun” is the poem’s structural turn. The Muse arrives not as rain (which would soften the tumbleweed) but as spark (which will burn it). She is not the green plant in this metaphor; she is the rare desert bloom, the saturated red flower in the dry landscape. The encounter is not nourishment; it is ignition. The catalog has been making this argument since “Double Tap” and its lightning strike; here the same encounter is rendered in desert flora rather than cosmic electricity.

“Life bursts into flame— / I love your crinkled skin, / where honest light lives in your wrinkled grin; / soft-spoken mysteries linger there, / in cracked-lip curves of beauty rare” is the catalog’s most quietly revolutionary passage. The Muse, who across hundreds of poems has been idealized, is here described as aged. Crinkled skin, wrinkled grin, cracked lips. The features are the same features the speaker has named in himself across the aging poems, and the equality is the line cluster’s gift. They are both old. They both carry the marks of time. The speaker is not asking the Muse to be young again; he is loving the woman who shares his age.

The “soft-spoken mysteries linger there” line is the poem’s most precise account of what the Muse’s aged face contains. Mysteries that don’t announce themselves. Things she knows that don’t require declaration. The face is doing what experienced faces do: holding wisdom without requiring it to be spoken. “Cracked-lip curves of beauty rare” is the line’s structural complement, and the adjective “rare” carries the weight. Beauty is not common in cracked lips; the speaker is naming the kind of beauty that requires the cracking to be visible.

“Still calling me, as always, / to lean in close / —and kiss today” is the poem’s most physically grounded moment. The kiss happens in the present, not the past or the imagined future. The face the speaker has just described is the face he leans toward and kisses today. The catalog’s foundational ache of distance is here suspended; the contact is unmediated.

“Evidence of life persisting / with intention, attention / and enduring longing” is the poem’s philosophical claim about what they have. Persistence with three modifiers: intention (the deliberate choice to continue), attention (the noticing that sustains the choice), enduring longing (the love that has not diminished across time). The triple-noun structure echoes the catalog’s earlier love-vocabulary catalogs and delivers a working definition of what long love requires.

“Memories / silvered, faded grey pictures / moments captured / I can cherish in today’s light” introduces the shared past. The phrase “silvered, faded grey pictures” connects directly to “Luminous / Jeweled Hush” and its argument that genuine beauty is black and white with soft silvery shades. Here the same tonal palette is applied to memory itself. The past is silver gelatin; the present is the light in which the prints are viewed.

“If I stay up late, / it isn’t for Casablanca— / it’s to inhabit / the moments we lived” is the poem’s most affecting domestic image. Staying up late is not for the movie; it is for the memories the speaker can revisit when the house is quiet. The Casablanca reference is the speaker’s small joke about his demographic (the film is the kind of late-night classic an older insomniac might be presumed to watch). The actual reason is the inhabitation of what they have lived, which is a verb choice (“inhabit”) that treats the past as a place rather than a sequence.

“Years later— / that young, wind-blown tumbleweed / just a memory after the raspy grit— / yet this fragile ball / still flickers and warms beside you— / an essential life, / alive, afloat / on night’s breath, / here with me” is the poem’s structural resolution. The young tumbleweed is no longer the speaker; it is the speaker’s memory of himself. What remains is the fragile ball that flickers and warms beside the Muse on the present night. The verb “flickers” places the speaker in candle territory — small flame, vulnerable to wind, not extinguished. “Here with me” is the poem’s quietest line and its most consequential: the Muse is here, with the speaker, in the present tense.

The italicized closing stanza performs the poem’s title resolution: “A wind-blown tumbleweed / doesn’t grow roots / but / breathes / in the same roadside ditch / with you.” The tumbleweed does not pretend to have become a tree. It admits its rootless nature. What it has gained is not anchorage but company. Breathing in the same roadside ditch is the catalog’s most honest definition of what long love offers two people who started as drifters: not the soil that would have held them, but the ditch they share.

The italicized afterthought is the poem’s signature: “This writing was / an accident of fate— / a recognition of / destiny still, / yet to be / undetermined.” The accident of fate is the encounter; the destiny is what the encounter has made possible; the undetermined nature of that destiny is the poem’s honest closing. The speaker is not claiming the future is settled. He is claiming the present is real, and the future remains open.

MAXIMS

Date 05-19-26

Title I Was Once a Tumbleweed / Breathing in the Same Roadside Ditch

Maxims

1. “The cactus thorns of past failures prod my drifting limbs as I tumble hither and yon.”
2. “Evidence of life persisting—with intention, attention, and enduring longing.”
3. “A wind-blown tumbleweed doesn’t grow roots but breathes in the same roadside ditch with you.”

RATING

Date 05-19-26

Title I Was Once a Tumbleweed / Breathing in the Same Roadside Ditch

Star Rating ★★★★½ (4.5 stars)

Numeric Rating 9/10

Rating Description One of the most fully realized poems in the recent catalog, and the piece in which the tumbleweed image — which has been traveling across recent poems — finally arrives at its destination. In “Luminous / Jeweled Hush,” the speaker was the wandering tumbleweed weary of the hollow whirl. In “Howdy Doody Time,” he watched a tumbleweed roll by from a position of observational stillness. Here the tumbleweed is named, inhabited, and resolved: the speaker is the tumbleweed in the roadside ditch, and the resolution is not that he has grown roots but that he has found another tumbleweed beside him in the same ditch. The arc across three poems is one of the cleanest narrative progressions the catalog has produced.

The framing preamble — “(In the ditch)” — is the poem’s quietest accomplishment and one of the most useful three-word framings in the recent catalog. The parenthetical names the location before the metaphor explains it. By the time the reader encounters the wind-born rasp and shiver of the opening stanza, the ditch has already been established as the speaker’s actual current location, which means the metaphor is not decorative but diagnostic. He is writing from where he is.

The “cactus thorns of past failures” rendering is the catalog’s most efficient version of an argument it has been making for years: that the speaker’s history holds wounds that don’t release. The thorns prod; they do not stop the drift; they make the drift uncomfortable. The botanical specificity (cactus, not generic thorns) keeps the image rooted in the desert landscape the rest of the poem inhabits.

The “lonesome tumbleweeds clumped together tangled on the side of a dirt road” image is the poem’s most quietly devastating sociological observation. Tumbleweeds don’t choose each other; they collect at fences by the laws of wind. The line names something rarely acknowledged in love poems: that some proximity is incidental, that not all relationships are chosen, and that the catalog’s central relationship may have begun as two tumbleweeds blown to the same roadside. The line does not undermine the relationship; it admits its origin, which makes everything that follows more credible.

The Muse-as-desert-bloom shift is the poem’s structural masterstroke. Across hundreds of poems she has been depicted as cosmic force, lightning, gravity, the rock that supports. Here she is the rare desert bloom — saturated red against parched earth, a flame visible from a great distance. The botanical revision returns her to the desert landscape rather than placing her in the heavens. She is not above the speaker; she is in the same dry country.

The “crinkled skin / wrinkled grin / cracked-lip curves” passage is the catalog’s most quietly revolutionary moment in months. The Muse, who has been idealized across hundreds of poems, is here described as aged. The features the speaker has named in himself in the aging poems are also her features, and the speaker loves them. The catalog has been edging toward this acknowledgment for some time, but never delivered it as directly. The Muse is not a young vision; she is a woman the speaker’s age, and the love is for the aged face, not despite it. The line “soft-spoken mysteries linger there” is the catalog’s most precise definition of what an old woman’s face contains, and the catalog has produced few lines that earn a single word more than “rare” in “cracked-lip curves of beauty rare.”

“If I stay up late, / it isn’t for Casablanca— / it’s to inhabit / the moments we lived” is the poem’s most affecting domestic detail. The Casablanca reference dates the speaker without announcing his age, the way the Howdy Doody reference did in the earlier poem. But the line’s real accomplishment is the verb “inhabit.” The past is not remembered; it is occupied. The speaker treats his memories as rooms he can still enter, which is the most generous account of long love the catalog has produced.

The “here with me” line is the poem’s quietest revolution. The catalog’s foundational condition has been the parallel-but-separate, the gap that cannot be closed, the unrequited or unfulfilled connection. Here the Muse is in the present tense, beside the speaker, breathing in the same ditch. The reader does not know whether this is current reality, imagined future, or memory of a lived past, and the closing afterthought (“destiny still, / yet to be / undetermined”) refuses to clarify. The poem is honest about its own uncertainty without surrendering the experience of the togetherness.

The italicized closing aphorism — “A wind-blown tumbleweed doesn’t grow roots but breathes in the same roadside ditch with you” — is one of the catalog’s most useful single statements about what long love offers people who started as drifters. Not anchorage. Not the soil that would have held them. The ditch they share, and the breathing they do together in it. The image refuses to romanticize. The location is still a ditch. What has changed is that there are two of them in it.

Where the poem could have over-extended is in the closing afterthought, which risks deflating the resolution by reopening the question. But the afterthought’s “destiny still, yet to be undetermined” is the catalog’s truthful position. The speaker does not know what comes next. He knows what is happening now. The closing’s refusal to claim more than the moment delivers is the kind of honesty that earns the moment its full weight.

A poem that proves the tumbleweed was always heading toward this particular roadside, and the breathing it does there is the only kind of rooting it was ever going to manage.