Mohave Sojourn: An Invocation

I have always wanted to write about the desert, ever since I read Dr. Andrew Weil's dedication in the preface of his book, Optimum Health, detailing that his manuscript had been completed at a house in the "middle of the Sonoran desert." The romance behind that phrase was palpable and it stuck with me. Then I saw the film and read the book The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje, and the desert again played on my imagination--through the sweep and scope of the love story that began in a more barren landscape than any of our North American deserts.

I live here in the desert now, but I still feel like something of an outsider, to be honest. The first poem I ever wrote about the desert was rejected a couple years ago by a journal in Nevada--promptly--which kept me from writing about it again until now. I felt I obviously needed more training. I also fear I will never be a 'desert rat,' as some here are wont to call themselves.

Yet the desert has its clear-eyed romance, it is undeniable.


Mohave Sojourn
Invocation, after Rilke

That it be here to end in the desert
sand and naked rocks gracefully countered
amid dead limbs of trees near the melt of rivers
with bottoms of stone and creeks fed by stream.

That it be here the skies all you imagine
the clarity which forgotten like a pavane to a death
once sung distinctly slows to a fade
the night quiet like that and full of creatures
drifting there among ancient pathways.

That it be here return to shoulders of the night
the purple silhouette ready, clearly in those mountains
that frame the floor as if it were sky.

That it be here sun an escetic prophet following
mystic bones and desert fathers to Joshua trees
parched; knows curcifixes knows wind as eternal lament
moves mountains in short order; the eye of an agate
the pinnacle of diamond.

That it be here for ache to live beyond the river
this thirst, this quench--this rich-willed land

That it be here is to lie--drenched, sweet
and dream of oceans.