that spat on the back of my neck

silence its content, its disposition, and generative

as language is generative

no one word reigns

I was shy, as we are before the original and self-evident

it immediately duplicated itself inside me, more than can be used in a lifetime

my first fire ingling in the recesses, I saw the scars

from its many tenants

THE DESERT FATHERS

With or without a bindle of crystal meth

they made their anchorage in Egypt’s

Wadi El Natrun, or the dismantled

Marine Corps training base of Slab City, California,

hard skills in transition, taking losses

and burning, if not with a sensible fire,

in the pride of specialized knowledge.

Snakeman relocates the red diamond rattlesnake

and northern Mojave rattlesnake

from residents’ trailers to his own to live

alongside him with the scorpions and guard dogs;

it’s tough to have riches and not love them.

St. Anthony sold his land, gave the money to

the poor, yet in his Outer Mountain sanctuary cried

I desire peace, but these bad thoughts

will not leave me. All burned in body,

in contemplation, as the lonely burn,

a musical state. The brethren assemble

for a meal, or, from the last free place in America

watch the Navy at war games bombing

the Chocolate Mountains,

but Snakeman prefers to exercise his hobbies —

salvaging undetonated shells, pointing

guns at people, antagonizing snowbirds

and short-term RVers communally parked

near the East Jesus Sculpture Garden

and preaching the ethics of solitude.

By vocation or necessity the future transforms

in the heat of the impartial desert.

Tourists and scholars of human interest

from villages along the Nile, or funnelled

through Niland, which the census

grudgingly designates “a place,” seek insight

but wish someone would do something about the trash.

Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain beckons

in three-storey robes of multicoloured latex.

He clocked in with a half-bag of cement and some paint

and kept at it for 26 years. But just as Anthony

decamped to his Inner Mountain

so Leonard did to the Eldorado care home,

and even the tattooed hermit of the Isle of Skye

took up a flat in Broadford. A cell

can teach you everything. All it asks is

you give it your mind. Snakeman wars against

the body that would destroy his spirit.

Someday, he says, I will be all flame.

“WHEN SOLITUDE WAS A PROBLEM, I HAD NO SOLITUDE”

Experience teaches, but its lessons

may be useless. I could have done without a few

whose only byproduct is grief;

which, as waste, in its final form,

isn’t good for anything.

A helicopter beating all night above the firth,

a druid shouting astrology outside

the off-licence, will eventually

put the Ambien in ambience.

Our culture is best described as heroic.

Courageous in self-promotion, noble

in the circulation of others’ disgrace,

its preoccupation with death in a context of immortal glory

truly epic, and the task becomes to keep

the particulars in motion