In the desert everything is simple.
There is life, or there isn't.
What life there is, is simple too -
there is too little sustenance for anything more.

In the desert my life is simple.
To just exist in this barren landscape,
this clean and windswept plain of long clear views,
pares away the dead soul-skin that fetters movement
in my city home.
My life runs free, untied, naked, outspread
over the small rocky hills.
Sometimes my body does too.

In the desert she kissed me. I kissed her there.
We kissed strong and hard, eager for
each other's life and passion and love.
We were small plants on the desert floor
and our finding each other was rain from a rare storm
that we swallowed gulpingly.
A city-kiss would never have been so sweet,
nor put such a spike in my memory.
It would have been weighed down by the buildings
and by the millions of people breathing the same air
and by our awareness of every detail
of our separate lives there.
She would have been another woman who I kissed in the city,
a street dark but for the lamp at its opening
and only to be explored as far
as I could still keep a glimmer of that light in view.
In the desert she was the open plain,
all that I could see as far as I looked,
lit dimly everywhere by the stars.
In our kiss was the starlight
and the soft wind that shifted the few grains of sand
on the hard-packed dirt
and the smell of the dew-damp sage just after dawn,
life and light and breath.

In the desert we were lovers for the moments
that we kissed. Then we weren't.
It was that simple.