Swimming In Desolation Poem by Denis Mair

(in response to two verses by Danaé Écarlate*, with thanks to Karl Kempton for this photo from his "Oceano Dunes" series)
… … … … … … …
The desert sand is a beach facing away from any ocean:

it faces the long historical crumbling that left it high and dry.

It has silence as its ocean and its verge extends along any dune.

The sand provides an expanse for wandering,

a non-resort for spending a holiday at the non-sea...

a resting place for one who would question the silence...

Here the major attraction is wave-writing from the universe.

Swimming takes the form of being racked by desolation.

Any immersion in such silence is a seed of singing;

any answering voice is carried on the wind.

The wish to raise grand questions shapes an edifice;

the edifice crumbles and releases a bird of song.
... ... ... ...

{Then, as if recalling a fragmentary dream, I hear a snatch of that song: }

hidden gate in the net of senses
roving receptivity in a titanic body
rift of desire and the space it defines…
off-center convergence of creation's self-pursuit...
tremulous ripple-front perfumed by absent ones...
inter-undulant guest and host... sightlines meeting...
reservoir and fountain merging... even here
a walled-in garden and jetting spray of flowers
… … … … …
… … … … …

{* Here are two verses by Danaé Écarlate to which I was responding:

I burst into tears, silently.
Silence, my flesh, born from a place that erases me.
Before the desert, I guessed it: he alone leads my voice kills by the sky.
Sand, blowing with a bottomless cry.
Brutal wind or still breath, I dare.
What he says breaks me up, haunts me.
Voices of the hollows, of which I am but a blurry echo.
The emptiness is the sand.
Ashes of us.
Desert of what remains...
... ... ... ...
I would like to find the words to describe the musky solar perfume of its sensitivity as a fragrance boasting right there
in the fold of a kind of consciousness.
I'd like to invent unsewn sentences to draw her heart-to-heart palpitations and mouth-to-mouth kisses that she dreams of.
I would like to describe the telluric whisper phoneme coming from the depths of the earth when she is enjoying the moment.
But words are not enough.… }