Midnight in the desert, a million miles away
From cities and from stars, from busy, sun-charged day,
Coyotes play harmonicas in the distance
That mingle with the scented winds to voice this silence
That won't allow one word to catch on hanging thorn
Canopies that drape the naked soil, that adorn
The stars as I lay in the cool gravel river
Floor, feeling a chill from the Earth's very center,
Gazing through the skeins of barren wood years have grown.
In this lifeless quiet I am far from alone:
Chipmunks and lizards, ants and birds scurry in shadows,
The day's slow rhythms are at night an endless flow!
Just to be allowed here, I feel I am a thief.
I've spent the day breathing, connected like a leaf
At the service of the breezes released for free
And leaving nothing of my footprints here to see.
At days end, with the joy of weariness, I find
Stray kindling, and make from what the sun left behind
A fire, crackling and raging, full of the desert,
What it suggests, the smoke conjuring up the dirt,
The roar bringing out the noise from the solitude,
Soothing out the complications, making them fluid;
So much simpler gathering wood than going shopping,
Or carrying water than plastic recycling,
Or thinking how one can survive with only this,
Than negotiating tempers on deadlines missed.
The painful life of ease is far less pleasing
Than a symphony of bobbing creosote can be
When one can see it smile, and one can hear it sing!
In all the things I'd heard I understood nothing,
All that time I tried to shove it back inside my ears—
There's nothing that I don't already know to hear
That isn't in this silence, magnifying stars,
Teaching something larger, of which I am a part,
Teaching I could stay here, be protected in the dark
No less than any creature, in this place so stark
That's been fought over in war as much as Europe has,
The endless range, where life remains what is, not as.
