It was here, in these prismatic
archways
the Grand Escalante
came to rest
reminisced in its own vast loss, its
subtleties
of color, immutable memories
blood
and rock
a complex, explosive
past
and now the stern cliffs rise, solemn and upright
austere and dark, having learned
the folly of their violent past
all that lava, all those rock bombs
scattered from spewn
upheavals,
now lukewarm
why, they just simply wouldn’t think
of it now
eagle canyon,
a dried black dragon barely breathing its
small fist of goldenrods, Indian paintbrush,
how the fragile things have overcome the
giants
slumbering loudly
under the low clouds,
one
frail root at a time
We don’t talk of our divorces, instead speaking
of how, at 12, I flew across the
black ice
of the Lombard
lagoon,
sailed on skates
made from
the crystalline
fire of the stars, more free than
I’ve ever been since
And how he as a boy so badly wanted a stuffed rattlesnake,
opted instead for the cheaper scorpion
encased
in plastic, back
when
he and his dad traveled
these roads and
oh, you just haven’t lived till you’ve gone into
the Salina ladies room,
absolutely
no doors, but guarded by
a 16’
Indian out front,
his raised
tomahawk crumbled a bit,
damaged, perhaps, in long gone battles
chopping away at some pesky
peeping
Toms
This roadside stop
a small pinpoint of vulgar light,
a tiny circus of silliness surrounded
by the weeping dark,
the vastly inscrutable endlessness
of the Grand Escalante
It is an ineffable eternity
of geometric puzzles
that God has patiently worked out,
His interlocking buttes and cliffs
intricate in streaming color,
covered in tears of sage
battered by fists of coal
an improbable enterprise
leans wearily, cowboy style, on
bars of the
cooling shafts of sun,
a lone beacon to the folly of man in
the form of a self-serve
worm stand
and I idly wonder
who inventories the livestock, what sort
of
loss prevention they have
concocted
And then Tom makes me laugh, saying
“if you’re born in Gunnison,
does that make you a son of a gun?”
behind us there is so much unseen
and even more unsaid, so much that is
eternal
slips away into the
darkness of Route 16
and
soon we see in the headlights
a
1200 year old cliffdweller abode,
crazily perched 15’ above the highway and
guarded by a small chickenwire fence.
Both of us think the same thing, but
we don’t speak of it.
all
of its ignomy, all of its glory, all of its
violent mouths, all of its shining, its beating,
its fury and its chaos
and its sublimnity, all of
it reckoning ....
no one lives there any more
