Four Corners Postcards - Utah

This desolate landscape
continually changes,
as seen in the sameness
of telephone lines:
from fractured range
to plains dust obscured,
coyote willow
turns to whisper grass,
Martian mountains to Venusian yellow cliffs.



From Mexican Hat
to the Valley of the Gods
the landscape slowly dots
with tufts of rabbitbrush.
The Western sun that turns
the world to violet
plays with autumn's
pink sage and orange stalks
and the plum beds of shale and clay, silted with gray,
and red slab outcroppings, layered with lignite -



More clean horizontals to frame
river canyons of chocolate rock,
formations like lizard hide,
bone-brown boulders
like teeth and joints,
sacred mounds of inhuman slag,
long flagstone bluffs,
sand and driftwood and seagrass,
from which rise



Giant shaved spires in animal shapes,
mesas with their crowns
like Parthenons in dreamscapes,
butte sides cantilevered
like pyramids dancing,
the wind-scarred rock yearning
for living form.
One horse stands before
a reach of green and rust
extending to the center of the Earth.



Life is scarce but large here;
the stones and hills are possessed of a force that stops time.
But there's no still point,
the landscape shifts and falls
like breath, swirling
in every dimension.

The wind blows in circles,
shapes the sculptures
and the sand, veined and
striped in seismic lines.
Nondescript shrubs spill
down spiraling cliffs.
Even the fences are crazy,
like an endlessly flapping flag.