Desert Anti-Epiphany...

Here I rest in bed looking through what was an original window of this old adobe house into the added-on living room and then beyond through plateglass with no opening through thickets of mesquite to the blue of the Catalina Mountains. The sparrows above the swamp cooler are opining incestuously, the ever-breeding brood.

And it is, in spite of its steep hills with their sharp ridges of quartz like an exposed enamel spine and violet shale and dark scumbled cactus against the light bright earth and massive mountain vistas receding against the Western light — in spite of all this, it is a place where people come with no purpose and lose their edges and themselves eventually recede against the light. Their shadows grow longer as they themselves grow paler within a landscape that at mid-day looks like an over-exposed photo. And so we blink at each other in the glare with a worn careless smile or shoulder shrug and nothing is gained but the repetition of phrases from things once read, once held fastened now loosened.

It is all a great dissipation.

Was anything brilliant ever accomplished in this place, I wonder, though others have harnessed their lives to it. The best made sporadic dashes elsewhere. There was a time of course — people here were much younger and before then the earlier settlers (well-to-do easterners shrugging the bonds of sobriety and social diktat) — when sex was a prize won at evening games and infatuations sprung endlessly — though why one and not another, or there was always another better buttered. I wonder why they bothered. Choices were fateful, some ending in death where happenstance was too highly regarded.

I try to recall the details but they leave me dull. It is beautiful here though, I tell myself.