The Desert Spirits
This ended up functioning like a lucid dreaming technique, in which I would sometimes be awake and sometimes in REM sleep, and sometimes in-between the two. This poem is a record of the things I saw and heard on that long drive through the desert.
(Photo by Johannes Plenio)
Driving Through the Desert
Years ago, I went on an extended road-trip through the desert Southwest, including the Painted Desert, the Mojave Desert, and the Great Salt Desert. I was riding in a small RV driven by my boss at the Celtic Music import company I worked for at the time. We were driving from Oklahoma City to Sacramento, CA to Estes Park, CO and back to Oklahoma City, selling imported CDs of everything from Cape Breton fiddle music to Gaelic singing.
I tend to drift off on long drives, but every time I did fall asleep, my boss would say something, or the RV would hit a bump in the road, and I’d be jolted back into full wakefulness again. This ended up functioning like a lucid dreaming technique, in which I would sometimes be awake and sometimes in REM sleep, and sometimes in-between the two.
This poem is a record of the things I saw and heard on that long drive through the desert.
The Desert Spirits
Storm banks in the distance on the Texas panhandle
Like diagonal mushroom clouds
Whose silent lightning carves fresh slices
Out of a flat, gray future.
Across the border, and we’re inside them.
The raindrops snap at us
Like falling monsters,
Biting at the windshield
In a suicidal dive.
And the wind whistles like a machine run amok,
And the clock stops,
And we are lost to time.
Pain can always be endured
If there is a voice to give protest.
Out here there are two voices:
And a void on either side.
She pouts, and cocks her head at him,
And says-
“Why, perhaps next summer,
When my dear golem-mad father
Turns the Earth into a prison for the goblins.”
“No, my dear,” he says. She hasn’t understood.
Pain can always be endured
If there is a voice to give protest,
But what I saw there in front of me
Had no mouth, just smooth skin.
The desert mountains are like great bodies
Pockmarked by scrubs,
Pale and obese in their roadside resting places,
As if we were passing
Through a plague pit
Choked with giants.
There’s a void on either side of me,
And an unexpected ache.
I am attached to my head like a balloon on a string.
Hours pass in a ghost phase,
Between sleep and waking.
My eyes squint at the mountains
And they become glass
In atomic heat.
Would you know how to find me here?
Would you trade my hope for new memories?
Because the Mojave is mighty
And I don’t want to come home.
Great rocks in the distance like the Gods of Stonehenge,
Standing in a circle with an untold secret,
Weaving out our past years
Among scrub brush and sand.
Canyon Diablo is skull dry,
And I hear things I can’t remember.
The spirits of the desert
Will trade bone marrow for wisdom:
Parasites of the empty places,
Sleep and learn, sleep and learn.
I found these voices in the wasteland,
Inside a fluttering darkness,
In all the endless, bright ages
Since I last saw your face.
If I could I would call to you,
I would cut your name through this emptiness,
But I’m trading blood for new memories
And I must meet them alone.
Out here the nighthunters
Have long faces and teeth like a canine’s.
The windmills on the hilltops
Look like arrows in a dragon’s spine.
If you would throw dice
With the desert spirits
You must have skin
That drinks everything,
Ready to cough up a basilisk
Close your eyes,
Cut your mouth,
And sing.
Would you know how to find me here?
Would you trade your bones for new memories?
Because there is nothing around me now
But this bright, empty
Faith:
Stretching out, filling everything
Burning atoms
To angel’s wings
Killing hearts
Till they break
And sing
And I don’t want to come home.
Christopher Scott Thompson
Photo by Tam Hutchison.
is an anarchist, martial arts instructor, and devotee of Brighid and Macha.
