A wadi is a riverbed that fills only after rare rain, and Mike Stone opens with one at its emptiest: "The long dry wadi snakes through the desert." What follows is a slow discovery that the landscape is really a self-portrait. By the last line the parched channel has become a body that no longer reaches toward anything. The central idea is quietly bleak. When desire fades, the world doesn't just look emptier, it stops answering back.
The first stanza is built on false comfort. The pebbles' thirst is "only slaked by undulating waves of silent mirage." The verb promises relief and the noun takes it away. The line also sounds wetter than it is, with its rolling "w" and "l" sounds, so the language performs the mirage: it flows, while the thing it describes isn't there. Then the speaker looks up from the ground to the horizon, where "Corillian golds and the deep violets" gather at the mountains' edges. These, he says, "belong to the sky; not to me." "Corillian" doesn't seem to be a standard word and reads like a coinage, an invented colour that is itself a piece of beauty held at arm's length. The semicolon shuts like a door. Beauty has become someone else's property.
The poem then turns on "Once, beyond the horizon of memory." The horizon, a feature of the desert, is borrowed to describe time, so outer and inner landscape merge. What lies beyond it is water, specifically the "luscious cold flow / Of water from rocks high above." Coldness and height are the opposites of the flat, hot ground in the opening lines, and "luscious" is the one openly sensuous word in the poem. Its richness shows how much has been lost.
The key verb is "spoke." The body once "spoke" to the water, to the "fragments of mist light," and to "the temptations of young women." The repeated "As it spoke... As it once spoke" works like a litany, and the list slides from landscape to sexual desire without a seam. For this speaker, thirst for water and thirst for people are the same kind of conversation with the world. The unpunctuated, broken-looking "fragments of mist light" even seems to mimic the scattered light it names. When the verb comes back, its object is gone: "Now my body speaks to nothing." The line is short and flat, and the semicolon leaves it hanging.
The ending is where the poem becomes unsettling. The body "only dreams of dark and soothe." "Soothe" is a verb pressed into service as a noun, and the title, "Dark and Soothe," sounds like "dark and soothing" with its ending clipped off, as though the language has dried out too. Whether "dark" means sleep, shade or something final, the poem doesn't say. Then comes the last line: "And drinks the moistness of slow scorpions." After all that cold, flowing water, the only liquid left comes from a venomous creature. "Moistness" is a clinical, faintly repellent word, much less inviting than "water," and "slow" suggests creatures as drained of energy as the speaker. The sibilance of "silent," "slaked," "soothe," "slow" and "scorpions" gives the poem a low hiss that links these last images back to the "snakes" of line one. The desert's animals frame the poem, and the speaker is left to feed on them.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and uneven line lengths. Its rhythm shrinks like a river drying up. The long, winding sentences of the middle give way to the clipped lines at the end, and single-line stanzas leave each memory isolated, like a pool in the sand.
Judging by the imagery, the poem may be about ageing, but it could as easily describe burnout or depression. That openness is part of its strength. It also refuses the comfort readers expect from desert poems, because no rain arrives. The speaker doesn't wail or protest. He says the colours "no longer interest me" in a tone close to a shrug, and the calm makes the loss feel complete. What stays with you is that last gulp of scorpion moisture, a small, strange image of how desperate need can become.