SATURDAY, JANUARY 17... on a three-day trip into the desert: I found beauty in the loneliness of surreal trees scattered among the piles of rocks in the desert landscape. Black and white photographs seemed more appropriate than color. Robert Frost's poem, "Desert Places" is at the end of this BLOG entry. The short verse that is my own made me think of his much better one.

Desert places are lonely
only if
I haven’t learned to deal
plainly with
the lonely places in myself.

(Click on individual images to see them larger.)


DESERT PLACES
by Robert Frost

Snow falling and night failing fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it--it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.