Once Upon A Desert Dream

Desert Dreaming

I dreamed I went to the desert. 

Not to see Jesus,

Not to be torched by sunlight

Or to walk on the burning scorched waterless sand.

Specialists of creation arrived ahead of me.

And like me, when the sun gave up

I no longer felt alone

I was joined in rapidly cooling darkness

By strange creatures moving,

Listening, buzzing, calling wildly.  All invisible

To my desert blindness.  My fearful voice,

A kind of feigned wailing did not seem to detour

Those non-aliens so adapted to that place and

Time tested to survive where I was not.

I must have had a dream purpose for being there. 

Surely to dream through the experience,

But more to observe adaptation of the resident's

Resultant consequences of their being there without humans

For eons and going through the motions of survival.

The sand was too hot for my feet.

The plants too course for my touch.

Some animals were venomous,

Biting things and others

Lived in husk-like hide-wear.

(Try to bio-mimic those outfits for humans)

All these ‘others’ seemed evasive;

Built for speed, cryptically colored, efficient.

I was in their place to learn or perish.

I was not honed for the comfortless desert.

There were no “wheat bellies” to be found.

And as observer I was observed.

When quick enough to glimpse their forms

I did not spoil their networking.

I felt as if in a play titled, “Observer observed.” 

What I could not see, they seemed to have noticed.

While I struggled to find shade

From the kiln-sun-fire

They slithered into crevasses.

I felt like there was no room at the inn.

My dream search, night or day, was for lost myths.

Stories of my youth about the “mother-lodes”

Told by others who had once found it

Having come to the desert

As a mysterious place holding untold treasures

Prospectors prospecting,

And they tried and they died,

Trying to report finding “it”.

Many learned tongue-thickened silence.

Some found ‘the lode’ and lived to tell of it.

Then, ironically, died trying to retrace their

Duned-over or forgotten landmarks.

I did not go dreaming in the desert for gold,

But for the salve of alternative solitude.

And when the dry night air showed me eternity,

When I reached up to touch the just out of reach stars

(So deceptive the clear night desert unbleached by sunlight) 

I sensed my mind as desert;

How it could go on beyond me, outlast this man.

And too, how the desert persists,

Howls in our absence,

(Like a mythical wolf cheering it doesn’t live on the moon)

Makes fun of our technology

Takes our lives so we won’t rot elsewhere unconsumed.

Deserted, I pondered the burial rituals

Of those ancient Egyptian desert-Nile people.

Their Embalming and companion treasures entombed.

Their myths allowed them to travel beyond the desert in death.

Their art and useful creations at hand entering eternity

Lest they be reborn in a Nile-less desert future.

Long before my desert journey

They worshiped sun and water,

Could not persist without it.

Oh, the patience of ancestors

Entombed in block-stone pyramids

Their sacred myths

Kept alive by the kin waiting,

Watching and wondering.

When human ignorance of long ago

Turned Eden to sun baked sand

Man’s ineptness was revealed

In a life-form we now call desert.

Those generations of desert peoples

Created a pitiless God out of a torturous sun.

An unchanging God until Man re-minded himself after It.

Awake now--writing this narrative poem

I know we cannot change fast enough,

To go wandering the desert as our permanent home.

Adapt or die.

I killed my desert dream. 

Like the storied myths of desert visions

Other desert wanderers and seers perished or

Crawled out and told of unbelievable things. 

Humbled by their inability to sustain a desert life

By way of these myths, I am keenly aware 

Of riparian- and savanna-man’s limitations.

Home again in Montana and the lush system of not-desert

I find common fellows who are more like me

Then any others anywhere I've been on earth--Americans.

And what I share with them is more than Man’s

Frailties, strengths and emotions.

The same magic seen in the desert beasts I dreamed;

(Skills to survive in place, places that make us all different)

I too am a magical animal; one of waters and less angled sun,

Of trees and soils filled with nourishing wetted life.

A place where rocks, drought and exposure

Challenge me to re-create myself

Joyfully while skillfully testing death.

Wild elements and situations foreign to domestic life

Renew me, send me back ‘home’ bravely pushing against time.

Time and chance create change--

A useful tool, often taken for granted, more often scorned.

We have short memory of places hostile to our well-being.

We remember homes where we loved and co-mingled.

Homes filled with lessons of courage to continue

And games of reasoning and love to sharpen

Against time our amazingly adaptive man-code.

A unique code passed through kinship to ward

Off ever-changing risks to our being

Human.