Creek Running North

Asleep for some hours this afternoon I dreamed it, so vivid. I might have poured sand from my shoes on waking. I’d just assured a friend I was sleeping well and then slept not at all, stumbled through a morning’s work getting a bare minimum done, and then at last gave up. Night running, the need of privacy while others sleep, a damned unwillingness to see the shrubs in bloom outside for one last time: I slept this afternoon instead.

There is a flaw within the rock and an unlikely canyon rides it. It splits the narrow peak from south to north. The rock is quartz monzonite, and light in color except where the lichen blackens it, where the desert varnish rusts it. This little cleft, perhaps four meters deep at most, a shallow gouge in the hot desert, nonetheless holds water. I have seen it flowing just beneath the surface. I have come upon a fresh footprint, a sheep’s split hoof impression in the sand, and watched it slowly fill with water. I first walked here with a friend I have not seen in years, and we talked as we clambered over little falls still damp at their cupped lips. There are ferns in the Mojave. She found them in a sun-seared fissure, roots sunk into a droughty clump of moss, and asked what they were. Oddly, I knew: Pellaea, cliff-brake or coffee-fern, and I meant to key it out to species but I never did. The hottest desert in the country, but snow does fall, and rain, and the little mountain gathers it, and that part of the wet that lands to the north of the summit trickles down through dry months.

I was there today, alone, the dark vault wheeling overhead. The sand was comfortable, the coyotes astonishingly close.

Our scarcities define us. A friendship felt most keenly in its absence, time spent at home most treasured when that time runs short. The desert’s names denote desolation or refuge, but more of them the latter. Pahrump, Tonopah, Ivanpah, Mopah, Hualapai, Supai, a constellation of names clustered around a native root word for water. Water is the center of the desert. It is the desert’s organizing principle. A seasonal spring dried up, and songbirds left, to come back when the spring flowed new, and people took the bird songs as their map, their calendar.

A scarcity of joy in a waste of sadness, and though I drink it greedily the joy endures. No slammed doors in the desert to raise my hackles, no importances unsaid nor trifles endlessly dissected. The dark vault wheels overhead, Canis dutifully following his master toward the west.

Last night I told someone I sleep six hours in the city, three less than in the desert. I longed for that arid rest. Today the desert sent it, coyotes song and conversations with the upturned darkling beetle, and then a dream of sleep.