Water in the Desert

                                               Things happen even here

                 hours from the outskirts of a voice

                      

                      some of us, it takes a while to notice

                        the water’s sweetness when we find some—

      a fine sand lines the bottom of a warm pool, steam

          collects in the navel, spills down the inside of a leg

                 the air on the tip of a dove’s wing slaps

                 and all the sanity wells up from the earth 

                 so we rest on its dirt, evaporate into clouds, and are glad.

                                                                           It rains for a minute

              and the shrub lets out its sly, formal smells—

                  you put an eye down into the water

               sweet and gray, warm inside the earth,

                      blurred laughter whistling on the edge of a dusted vision.

               The knife grass whistles too

            and the water blurs through

                                    a crack in the source

                                    one more tiny noise

                 off in the bushes,

                              a giggle and a bray in time,

                                                  quiet now

                 quiet quiet, look, a pool

      let’s spread a wobbling memory over it

         a world it always hurts to fill

               with warnings and inscriptions

            dissonant, competent flashes

                                           cloud with a poison gust at the tip

              the stone, the human sweat

                       Snoopy’s face spray-painted on a rock

                                   careful now, careful careful.

                            The sky changes at the spring’s source

        takes on the color of a hummingbird’s chin

          pulls my human half down into the earth’s occasion and poise

   up to my shoulders in this sane heat

           sweet on the skin

           stinks on the nose

       gravity and wind, center and ground

    laughter, the closest touching form

 ripples across the edge, puts all the self in this water

     washes off the ineluctable and supple bitterness

             of alkali dust

                            in secret over here

                              hours from the outskirts

                                       a mountain droops upside down

                                             on the surface of the pool

                                           drink and look, get a bit more distant

                                                     more thirsty, laughing quietly

                                              careful now, careful careful.

Jared Stanley is a poet who often works with artists and sometimes writes in prose. He is the author of four books of poetry, most recently So Tough (Saturnalia, 2024).