The Snake Charmer

Soundless music wafts through the desert, in its most isolated places,
and if you only learn to hear it, you too can charm the snakes.

Whirlwind flutes, hollowed gourds filled with mesquite thorns,
the thumping rhythm beaten out by a bird on a saguaro.  

People ask me now, when I live in another world, one with a paler sun,
about the inconvenience and the heat.  You adjust, I tell them.

The idea of acclimation:   it’s true and yet not true.  
People both change and fail to change.  

You get used to sweat and heat, to the use of solar power.
When alone, you accommodate yourself to silence.

Back home, you fight with your partner over a TV show, a tablet.  
The simple life is gone, vanished, like a drop of water poured out on the sand.

In the summer, you can pour an entire gallon of water on the ground
and in sixty seconds, there’s nothing left, no hint of moisture, not even vapor.   

To survive, the snakes feed on dryness, the rattlers collecting the rain
on just their bodies, then suck suck sucking themselves dry.  

If, like a great saguaro, you could live out there for years, 
you could build up an ethos, a moral code, a system,

collecting it all up inside you, like drops of rain 
harvested from a vast root system over decades.     

Like me, you might find Kant in Arizona, hiding out in Plato’s cave.
I’m just an outlaw—that’s what he told me.  Another Jesse James.

But in town, all bets are off.  You stockpile food, hoard bottled water.  
You fight your neighbor for the last six-pack of toilet paper.

It makes you long to return to the almost barren land
where there is no promise of tomorrow’s food, tomorrow’s water,

where the two sure things are the Western diamondback
and the song you sing to charm it.