A Year in the Desert

 

A Year in the Desert

(“Then He went away by Himself to pray in a desert.” Luke 5:16)

The songs no longer come easy, the
rests and notes run together randomly.
When the blue jays whistle
the empty sky swallows their songs like
peeling paint from clapboard siding.

The songs once rose like nursery rhymes
unaided by years of leaded study. That is
why this is so hard to write.

The songs were for other folk.

And approaching endgame, the final moves, checkmate
looms. Alone with a head

Full of thunder again.

Some saw bravery; the options simply ran out. Stepping
aside across the unaided expanse, no one showed up to
say goodbye.

The words died upon the journey, the melancholic joy
sank deeper beneath another crawlspace with uneasy answers.
No one showed up to say, “how the hell are you?”

A year in the desert is spent crying for water, wishing for
another chance
where the rains wash away every question ever asked. Thirsting
for the rain that paints it all with green and yellow and pink
when the heart pumps only sludge through the man standing
under a frightening sun, onstage before no one.

But upon the advent of the second year the lonely sky
mentions that butterflies love sunflowers and
mockingbirds never sing the same song twice.
Upon the advice of professionals, the blood thins,
the skin is scanned, and the desert is no longer solitary
confinement. Sometimes the guitar strings are rusty
from months of humid atrophy. But strings can be
replaced.

Like a sitar being tuned, the desert became birth pangs;
music played only by a virtuoso. Maestro, play on.
And if no one knocks on the door to hear because
the music sounds foreign to the neighbors’ ears,
mentor us well; the few who had to venture

Far into the desert to hear the wind and sands
sing of the origin and cause of every song
that every wanderer longed for.