The Desert Personality

"People disappoint, nature never does," a strange and beautiful person once told me. This comment prompted me to write a poem, which follows this entry. Over the years I have often taken an overheard phrase and crafted a whole life around it in a poem, as is the case here.

Though in darker times I have focused on the first part of that sentence, I have been much more acutely aware of the latter half as of late. Each morning when I leave my apartment, I am struck by the beauty of even the most subtle of nature's displays. The sunshine, the flowers in the courtyard, the dew, birdsong. And I think back on my entire life and realize that never once has nature disappointed me. Even the seemingly post-Armageddon desert around Palm Springs has its hidden charm. Yes, every time nature has delighted, if not knocked me over with wonder.

"Why is this?" I thought to myself. I've come up with a few answers:

* I don't expect anything from nature. And because there are no expectations, it never disappoints.

* Nature carries with it such a divine, peaceful feeling of being-ness, whereas human action is so concerned with doing and achieving. The frenetic energy of the latter and the ensuing emotional drama created by all this fussing necessarily result in disappointment for all concerned.

I do realize that some people are disappointed with nature. I met one at Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 2006. Aaron and I were viewing Mammoth Hot Springs when a German tourist voiced his dismay. The colors were not as vibrant as he had expected them to be, the water was not as bubbly as he had wished. Aaron and I both thought this was funny: complaints about grandeur. A definite sign of a "desert personality."

Here now is the poem, written so long ago:



The Desert Personality

“All I want from life is solitude,”
he told me one morning after sex.

“Perhaps I’m invisible,” I thought,
“A non-entity with a mind,
something I strongly suspected as a child.”

There was no bedroom mirror
with which to test my hypothesis.
I realized he wasn’t intentionally hurting me,
since I wasn’t really there after all.
And if I were, perhaps I was an accomplice in his solitude,
someone to share his vision of silence in the dunes.

As it were, all I had were his words
of the disappointment humans had brought him
and the peace only a hermit can know.

He’d made it clear often enough
that he didn’t need me or anyone else.
For years, I pretended the same,
telling myself he was just so much fun,
easy to love, easier to leave.

“Don’t expect anything and you won’t be disappointed,”
he often advised.
Years later, he said he hadn’t meant this to apply to him,
though he was the case with so few exceptions.

A few times he told me about the woman he had loved,
how often he thought of her body,
how much he missed her breasts in his hands.
He’d lived with her for seven years,
something he wouldn’t consider doing now,
since he wanted to be alone,
with his rabbit,
his dog,
his parrot.

We’d spent maybe a month together,
if all the hours were laid end to end.
It’s only right he should want her, I lied to myself,
though a decade had passed
since he had held her breasts in his hands.

I wonder if he’d told her, too,
that all he wanted from life was solitude.