Like Snow in the Desert

Like Snow in the Desert

(“May the Lord be praised! He has given rest to His people…” 1 Kings 8:56a)

Places arise from consciousness, buried below
beliefs and farmland. Who hears the seeds shouting?
Who cuts down trees with birds in their limbs?
Healing arrives on unexpected days like
snow in the desert, like the pastels the peek through
the side hills and mesas.
I can’t explain it,
but silence is my medicine,
slow is the pace of my reanimation.
In the hollows of our minds there are snapshots
reminiscent of times we laughed without reserve.
The canyons opened on either end to rivers so
lazy
they barely spoke a thing.
If I was young again I would
take more naps in the sun.
I would unwind the yards of
insistent lanyards that kept me painfully
straining to submit to the instructions
left behind by my captors.
After so many miles there are curio shops
with silver and turquoise awaiting my slow meanders
between aisles of beadwork and sage.
After so many years there are drum songs I wish
I could hear one more time again. There are
friends
whose smile (even those who think I’ve
lost my way) would light my soul like
campfires that smell of mesquite. We
would tell our stories without critique,
laugh or cry, we would walk the winding way
with songs still incomplete. And our faces
in the fiery glow
would tell us everything we ever needed to know.

Like Desert Provocations

 Like Desert Provocations

(“‘You will not succeed by your own strength or by your own power, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord All-Powerful.” Zechariah 4:6b)

The opinions stood out on the desert floor like
provocations, pine nuts in pasta. And still, we will not
admit
that we cannot see more than three feet
in front of us. All our blind theology
fuels warplanes and necessary conflict.
All our certainty sets up the fighter’s cage
where the sun scraped every inch of humanity from
the combatants.

Men read book after book to justify
their dominance, their fists that excuse every
pummeled wall as they try to take back a country
that never belonged to them.
Their women
submit
because
the bible tells them so.
Then men insist
because
Jesus called them to be
warriors. There is nothing sorrier
than queues of soldiers
being told they are doing it for god.

We have looked for divine vengeance in
explosive independence. We have mummified
Jesus,
tying his rugged hands to national flags,
tying his dust covered feet, contorting them
into unreliable combat boots that stir the smoke
that blinds us still.
The eyes of god never looked so frightening
than when
we defined them as our policy of civil defense.

We need the desert again, oh fathers. We need the
silence to offer our daughters. We need the solos again,
oh mothers. We need the
lullabies to solace our sons.

And once the discord is discarded,
once we admit our shallow discontent,
we may see, we may hear, we may listen like
lost dogs who have found their way home.
We may discover the Spirit never obeys
our transgressions. We may discover the Spirit
always
lifts us alive from
the carnalities of war.

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.

Sometimes the Desert

Sometimes the Desert

(“But you were unwilling to go up. You rebelled against the command of the Lord your God.” Deuteronomy 1:26)

The drive is too far, the desert cold;
the needles bite the sky and capture the clouds in their teeth.
How quiet the pain when mountains crowd the horizon;
but it shouts when the road becomes too full of ghosts.


We leave one giant to face another. We hope to leave the effort behind.
For more than the best of us, and careful for the rest of us, they loom after one hour’s nap at a midlevel rest stop.

The rest is never our final destination, another winter wind whips the sand in our face.
Crossways it captures our coats and our hats and tosses them into the desert alone.
We stand at the edge of designated borders, feet obedient to the signs and fences.
It does not enter our minds to seek another passage.But we have come too far, resigned our bridges, retired our employment and
vacated our tents a long time ago. To return from our turning only postpones
the new land of promise. But we fear. 

So we wake the next morning, manage our pain, and venture on the next leg
that leads us closer to anonymous towns where life is larger, names are sharper,
roads are confusing and the earth harder than before. 

How do we face the giant when it was the giant we thought we had left behind?
When pain is the master, the driver and the passenger, even pebbles threaten the
passage of time. 

Sometimes faith is not having a choice. Sometimes forward is the only gear left.
Sometimes the corner forces you out into the cold. Sometimes the desert opens your eyes.

Vermillion Lizards

Vermilion Lizards

(“Now it is planted in the wilderness, in a dry and thirsty land.” Ezekiel 19:13)

The paper thin clouds were vermilion lizards crossing the sky,
every memory was gladiolas and hibiscus, yet the
present story was saguaro and milkweed.

Turning toward the only breeze we can find
and stepping across undefined stream beds full
of pebbles; the parched taste buds of drought

A dehumidified sigh is lost among the rusty squeaks
of hawks tracing, dot to dot, a rabbit’s trail as the
shadows grow longer and supper is served.

None of us want to sound ungrateful (some of us do,
I wrote too soon). Some of us remain so fateful
we cannot admit the cracked lines upon our tongues.

But, when the past seems emerald and greener,
when our wishes outnumber the days allotted,
when we long for rainy days and play-school friends,
even in the desert, when we empty our pockets
and place the dust upon the end-table of our existence,

God, let the desert please us, as it must please you;
as fully created, cared for and crammed with color
as the East Bay Hills or the Northwest Harbors.

Miss the Mojave

Miss the Mojave

(“All of you are children of light and children of the day. We don’t belong to night or darkness.” 1 Thessalonians 5:5)

All I can say is we finally arrived,
travelling all night; summers from Southern
Cali
made frightful a daytime passage through Needles.
90 degrees at midnight, the darkness was dense
as the day.

I missed the Mojave; shadows of yucca were
moonlight silhouettes that moved across the dark floor;
shadow boxes viewed from the back of our desert
whale cruiser. The black Rambler station wagon
swallowed the desert heat and smothered the sleep
right out of us. Dad never paid for air conditioning;
and if we had it, he wouldn’t run it,
we sacrificed cool comfort for increased gas mileage.

One summer we returned so quickly we had to brave
the pounding sun on cracked sand hot as concrete.
Though sweat beaded up and vanished in a single thought,
the colors grabbed our collective complaints as
the death the dark insinuated was alive with the light
we hurriedly pursued.

Prickly pears with tiny yellow blooms,
Beavertail with magenta on outcropped rocks,
Red spines on Mohave clusters spiked their diameter
in tangled mass; scarlet dots the side of the stems.

Mesa and flatland, thunderheads and chuckwallas
swing the panorama from station wagon panel to panel.

Life was scarce, true enough, but not the phantom we saw in the
careful midnight crossing.

The radiator blew, dad always knew, and we never flew again
without checking our watches for midnight across
the great Mojave. 

When the Wind

When the Wind

(“Suddenly, a sound like a violently blowing wind came from the sky and filled the whole house where they were staying.” Acts 2:2)

The sand stretches its aggregate collection across
the desert where horizon greets bluing sky: quietly.
The desert has its own silence that waits for the next burst
to rearrange dunes southern and scoot stones in the other direction.

Heat rises from the accommodating desert floor, stored overnight
while the air froze motionless and skies expanded curtainless
for eyes to take in the old-fashioned light of stars perhaps
flickering their last quiet millennium.

No one observes the processes that take longer than the
lifespan of a man,
but the evidence left behind suggests more life in bands
of history jammed in practice-cake layers.

The flash floods widen the floor and deep,
the accelerated water feeds the sleepy saguaro
and wakes the watching Gilas for one more life-giving
drink.

Waiting is a better virtue than making,
praying is a better chart than late complaints.
When the wind arrives, give wing;
When the fire descends, then sing;
when the Spirit fills, then everything is burning
(bushes and hearts and thrones and plans)
until the desert blooms with grace like Eden
again.