What is this white intensity
swallowing me as the night swallows and now disgorges
only Jonah was rocked and the night
is sorrowful music
but this is something else? What is this absence,
immersion as faith is a kind of immersion,
a thirst for light in the true air?
Look at the sun’s jailbreak over the violent
walls. I’ve driven all night
to find myself here. Look at the gypsum desert,
elements scattered like 7-Elevens all the way to Death Valley,
the way L.A. reaches into it, one hundred miles or more.
I’m talking about America, the thing itself,
white line unreeling, pure distance, pure speed.
I’ve driven all night
from fear of the darkness that would seize me if I stopped,
even coffee at a truck stop, even water. Look
at the wraiths of stars,
Buick Electras rusting in the freight meadow.
It is the ghost of the light that moves me.
I’m talking about the half-seen,
dawn and evening, desert orchids,
coyotes coming down to the river to drink.
I’m talking about the thing itself,
what rises in the night like anger or grief,
language-less, blistering and overbrimming
as a river coming down from the mountains
to die in the sinks of rushes and alkali,
the absolute purity of light or intention,
memory of grace, seagulls canting windward
above the Great Salt Lake—
the sun, the desert,
the weight of the light is staggering—
until even the flesh of our days falls away,
ash from a cone, fruit from a stone. Even now
when the whirling miraculous
wheel in the sky has risen and vanished at first light,
gears of a huge engine, starlings
drunk on oxygen—
when the wheel
is gone and I am alone with the willows
at the edge of the utterly desolate
Mojave River.
I’ve driven all night toward the basin
of angels. I’ve driven all night without understanding
anything, need or desire, this desert, neon
signs remorseless as beacons.
I’m talking about America.
I’m talking about loneliness, the thing itself.
I’ve driven all night to find myself
here. Look around you,
even now look around you.
Dawn breaking open the days like jeweled eggs,
Joshua trees crippled by this freakish rain of light.