Hiding on the Desert

I find myself on a dirt hill filled with burred desert weeds that scratch and tickle, looking to a mellow gold sun splattering light against a wide arc of thin clouds going vaguely lavender. High summer has the desert on a day with no storms, the softening of evening massaging my exposed skin, an invitation to sit and sip at lemonade, talk softly in the wind, keep eyes on the west as the sun melts into the low volcanoes. It is now, in this ease and spent, that I don't know anything, or anyone. The fast running thoughts of days are done, and I see pictures of things that spoke, heavy raindrops plunking leaves in a cool charcoal sodium light after a hailstorm and a dharma talk about freedom, of slipping out an upstairs window in the dark and floating among the oak trees in my childhood backyard, of walking tall in the dark talus under the pyramids of the high peaks surrounded by echoes of old times in other lives, of Liverpool streets wet and shining in a sliver of white sun before dusk and the feel of a tight blue suit and black leather boots. And I'm queasy from big bites of untouchable sun and drunk from too much motion and the gulf between me and community. Hiding on the desert, in the open in a low slung matchbox of pumice and coffee mud, silent on the green concrete floor, waiting for a knock, a ring, a calling voice, but shooing such notions away with a middle that flutters for fear of exposure, of reckoning, of spilling from its casing. What do we do with these lives? What is the promise in the wind that allows a breath so sweet and gives a caress so disarming that to die doesn't seem an ending but a float in a canoe on a calm lake? I'm asking questions and I don't need answers. I'm wading and when I walk outside and take in the desert with my eyes, the mountains in my groin, I lick the land and it seems small, moving from all directions to a single point. It is the saddest thing I've ever felt, the vastness, and the inverse. It comes on as love, cushioning and enlivening, telling me in whispers that it's already over, two seasons ahead, buried under snow. And I think maybe this is all I have to tell, sing-songy on the inside, wanting to cry, wanting to be devastated by beauty, to speak in a long language, loopy and hoarse with an endless acoustic guitar strumming in the background, laying everybody low. It is a song that I hear, that I feel, I tremble with it, and it has bits and pieces in it, fragments of blood and the call of the late night, which I know to be another call misinterpreted, a wild horn from the valley. I have walked (and run) with people and spirits, gaining streets and finding sunrises, looking and talking and telling truths that fade with the sea sickness of the day, and seem preposterous, or merely unreachable...until the summer evening, high desert wind, the heat turned to a lover with smooth, cool skin, skin to rub against, skin to dream on.