To Read ruth weiss’ Desert Journal is to enter a space that is both objective and abstracted

Desert Journal 

Poetry is a tongue for tasting the world. It’s the un-translated or semi-translated material of experience. It’s not always a great graph of days or bushels of apples per acre or the relative velocity of one train verses another, but there are things that can only be learned by taking this substance neat and in gulps.

I have carried ruth weiss’ Desert Journal in bags and backpacks and coat pockets on three continents. I’ve read it on the London Underground, on airplanes and in a hotel room next to the Dead Sea. I have read this book at least seven times and every time and in every place I find new things. Weiss’ imagination is acrobatic and she doesn’t seem to try to curb it. 

a stranger familiar 

crushes something into the palm

the hand becomes a tree

there is shade & fruit

ripe dropping 

fingers stretch to enclose 

its universe

free

sounds fill what was vacuum

cradling release

Desert Journal is separated into days, not in a sense of month/day/year but in a sense of how long the exploration has been. As weiss sinks into this dry place her playful, tangential wisdoms ripen in their own time and she loosely gathers them. Weiss has a way of approaching the play of wisdom. For me, this is nowhere clearer than her investigation of colors, one of these is red:

red is a color

red is a sound

red cannot range

having committed itself

Her approach is a combination of innocence and experience that results in images that can inhabit the reader and change them. 

Rhythm, excavation, revelation make their way throughout this work. I suggest that people read Desert Journal and then read it again a year later. The writing rewards deep reading.