Grand Canyon
You thought you had your reasons
but it was the River who called you to Her
one immensity to another, said
ditch the computers, clocks, cars,
trade your couch and sleep number bed
For a boat, a cot and a blanket of stars
and make your way to Lees Ferry
where the boatman calls you by your name.
And so you are washed and rocked and drenched
and splashed and tumbled down
and down
and deeper down
into a chasm unfurling the story of time, to the sipapu
of your mother.
Kaibab,
Hermit,
Muav,
Bright Angel,
Tapeats,
down a billion years to Vishnu Schist
and Zoroaster Granite, your guide pointing,
reading to you the history of your heavenly body,
its syntax of heat and gravity both delicate
and violent, how collisions with necessity
cook and shape, fracture and bind,
annihilation transfigured, finally,
into beauty.
At Fern Glen, you walk into a slot canyon
carved by a spring to find the song of stone,
which is a silence below stillness
that only your bones can hear, and answer.
At Hakatai Rapid, you know what the River wants to take from you
is the rock against which your life has been shattered
that you’ve carried at the bottom of your heart ever since
because Her law allows no obstacles,
because Her job from the beginning of time
is to bring that souvenir of your undoing back to the sea
where all is understood and all is forgiven.
At Stone Creek, you are baptized in a clear spring waterfall
guarded by a lizard and adorned in tender green
and you realize the secret name of water
is mercy, and something
has been returned to you
that you didn’t know you’d lost.