Anza Borrego SP
Unseen above, at every turn below
Are guardian faces, everywhere, watching,
And smaller faces embedded in the same stone
Observing at every bend and every fold,
Each one looking out, at us, who pass without seeing.
There are wise men on one ledge, kings on another,
Pious women with small solemn faces
And wild flaring dresses to hold it all inside,
And there are, everywhere, textural messages
From the water that has touched everything,
From primitive pictographs to folding
Stochastic permutations, all glorious curve
In one swirled wave from serpent water
And its keys to consciousness spiral, below
The council of deities, the ledge homes for fairies,
The towns of choiring elves, the poets and warriors
And priests as on display, almost two-dimensional,
Papery, leaning over the edge. The bugs and birds and
reptiles
Who have joined are embossed also in the walls,
Like a book of pinned butterflies, amid the breasts and
torsos
And other connections to what is sacred embedded in the
stone,
Loops dancing like the play of egg and sperm, stick
figure
Battles with arrows and skeletal funeral processions,
The cleaned skulls of sacred hoofed grazers,
Alligators, low frogs, high owls, whales in mid
filter,
Kissing fish, masticating cows, grinning tigers, elephants
Caught by surprise, huddled sloths all eyes, a gorilla
Embracing a lamb with his Vedic three-point cap,
Buddha panda bears, bug-head aliens with bulging veins,
Cartoon ogres with lips distended, heads with multiple
eyes,
Then the bridge overhead of no words
Opens to massive mathematical buildings
And towering cathedral spires in wizard robes,
Cliff homes with eyes for every bat and tiny creature,
And the towers get bigger and more circular
As the creatures turn to wolves and raptors,
The nestled cubes fit more painstakingly together
And, at the point where ape and human are melded
As one, raised roofs and turrets look down on
Gravel hillsides lined with stalks like little trees over
the vista
Where the canyon opens, the rocks below broken like
pottery,
With the imperfect, unfinished sculptures cast aside
And glazed with the drippings of pink mud.
A giant lizard lies at the top in the beating sun,
Around the bend, a giant lion, slightly golden,
And then come creatures beyond recognition,
And the inscriptions become equations of some
unrecognizable truth.
Then the straight red lines of infinite guidance begin,
What has to stay at a distance, and there, on an island below
In the crispy glistening silt, people have stacked
rocks in homage.
Then there is the final rise, behind hollow-eyed guardian dogs,
A pyramid that holds the sun, emptied like an instrument.
The cracks in the clay below are like something breathing.
And then, in a blink, comes the final gift, that the
passageway
Is nothing but blank white stone.
