Arches Quarter
moon over Calf Creek, a stand of pink tamarisks, 3
straight cottonwood, 4 arched, 7 by lightning split. The
steep walls of Escalante rise up white, red, clay, brown, now streaked with black. To the north, Death Hollow
cuts wild salt cedar shadows from out the sun washed plateau. Thick
green moss adorns a riverbend. Old Man
Sage fills his pipe. The
air blows sweet across the red bench. A
small black snake scrambles into beaver dam. Long
green snake marries its tread to sand. With
violet-green wings combing the rock, thin-shouldered swallows loop down on the fly. Is any color more pleasant than their blue-green back? Not silver green cool of sage & Russian
olive. Not dark green of wise juniper. The feminine yellow-green of willow & tamarisk. Deep green of oak &
cottonwood leaves. Not
bright green of horsetail, cattail, or rosemary, not blue mint ricegrass in my palm. Wind
blowing in from far off Texola, but soft, gentle as apache plume. Around
the first bend, after Sand Creek, up high, on the ridge, a natural bridge carved by who? One more turn & Escalante
Arch swings into view, its flight of swallows, memory of ice––the loss, beauty’s gift, as mountain and desert are Nature’s fiction, but, the arch is her poetry, her startling compression of clarity & depth. What
says great Eternity, her blue mouth of sky flashing through arch’s dark lips? Who
is speaking? Whose
breath do I feel as the endless river cradles each long weeping storm. The
heart is an arch, a subtle & exquisite form. Thru
it, see the Summer Triangle. In
that, the Northern Cross.
Always more snow, rain and clouds, the literature of hawks. Not
a tiny pear cactus shall pierce the emptiness within, yet makes way for what is to come. Stone
expands, always moving further out. It
is our crumbling opens up the arch, & we are put on earth but a little space that we may learn to bear the beams of Love. Escalante
Canyon 25-28 June
1990 [Published in Grasslands. © 1994 by Jim
Cohn.] |