the desert does not love you back, but it
sees you, dunes hunched in watchful wake,
brooding and clenching a hold of my heart and
eating it. there are stains on the sky from my fingers
sticky with the juice of dates and aloe, there are
burn marks on my wasteland from where the sun
has blistered and bled. god is the silence like
sandpaper, teaching me to thirst, taking the untamed form
of the mountains and teaching me that
i am the wilderness.
Poet’s Note
I wrote this poem while in the desert of Oman, having traversed gravelly giants and remote expanses of bare-breasted earth to sit in the shadow of perpetually reshapen sand-dunes. It amazed me that my human ancestors lived in places so hard on your skin. All these invisible lives that led up to mine being here. I felt aged, as though I had walked through histories, in and out of myself. I had so little sense of this earth existing before entering it. It is a land as brutal as it is magical, in heat and isolation and hostilities: the golden resin of frankincense, the dates and rosewater coffee, bananas and spices, camels and red-woven rugs, life against all odds. It carved into me. I still wear the scars of its thorn brushes, its blisters, its sunburn. Momentary traces of being made permanent in skin and in memory. “No man can live this life and emerge unchanged,” Wilfred Thesiger wrote in Arabian Sands. “He will forever carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert.”