Monday, June 22, 2009

Edge

It could be seen both as a fierce rising or a great falling. The tops of the canyon walls are the desert’s scapula, and its boulders are other pieces of crunched bone, flung all around.

You can’t help but be honest with yourself in a place like this. Its effect is similar to meeting a young person whose face does not conceal well the truth that there is a skull hiding just millimeters below the pink of breath.

The entire landscape seems to have learned to live with little flesh, and has peeled its many bodies apart, leaving steep, heaping piles of grizzly teeth, sun-dried tongues and over-stretched ligaments.

The wind rages on, and the only thing that does not get blown away is the big, potbellied sun, who seems to like it here, gliding on his great, golden ship as slowly as possible, in no hurry to silence the Singapore night.

In the canyon bottom the Evening Primrose arches her back during twilight, and allows the Sphinx Moth his one drink from deep within her skirts, while she lets her hair down, kneecaps trembling.

This afternoon I covered my beard in my father’s ashes, and stepped forever into my manhood.

May 2007
Kaibab Plateau, NW Arizona

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