Of Canyons and Their Discontents

"I have come to kill Indians, and I believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians."
-- Col. John Chivington, speaking of the 1864 raid in which U.S. Cavalry troops under his command killed more than 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho women and children *


“Everyone sees the Grand Canyon, but 
Bryce is really better,” the hotel clerk tells us.
He’s young, perky; the wall behind 
the desk contains two ads: See the Petroglyphs 
and Support Our Troops. He has the possessive pride 
of those who live in strange geographies: 
with so many canyons, they’re not easily impressed.

Up in the room, we laugh at him:
All day our minds have struggled to cope
with those stone cliff striations of billions, 
one year crushed down upon the next, mauve
on crimson on ochre on umber, 
scorched and scored by infinite blue, 

forced to think that word, infinite, over 
and over—the word that set my head spinning 
when I first spoke it, as a child,
first lay in grass trying to see where the sky ended, 
and felt the heavens swell to meet my push,
give and give until I had to look away.

That roil of fear and pleasure in my gut 
came back today, descending
from snow in the Rockies into land that looks 
cut from slabs of bloodied muscle.
Our words have shrunk from sentences,
collapsed into whoa, then wow, 
finally just breath

-- all we can do is breathe,
on empty roads between red mesas,
sipping coffee in a string of breakfast nooks,
watching tiny soldiers on CNN
work their way into Baghdad, riding
an endless scroll of text below their feet.

My friend, my fellow traveler, 
there are things words cannot get at: 
canyons so huge and ancient they dwarf 
the idea of words, the idea of people, the idea of countries
the idea driving across a country
abloom with yellow ribbons, endless flags. 

Big, huge, enormous—everyone sees 
the canyon--so many, no one sees it anymore. 
Postcards, photos, dust in people’s eyes, 
carried away beneath their lids as memory—
the canyon each time diminished?
With each travelogue’s word, a little less awesome?— 
What is talk worth where canyon walls 
look like flesh, and where our ears 
boil over with language—
collateral damage, friendly fire—
describing scorched flesh we will never see?

Yet here in the desert, there is no obligation
but this thread of words we spin between us, 
this laughter and the common dream
no digger finds intact. The land is thoughtless:

the metaphor, the good idea that didn’t catch
disappear with sinew and with nerve;
future tribes will knock the dirt 
from bones, from clay-caked arrowheads and guns.

They will know us by artifact, not intent.
This is how it is with words and canyons: 
the more we see them, the more they disappear.

Let us go into those caves up in the hills
where warriors and antelope dance in faded lines
and write, alongside them, our own story:

We made two towers; our enemies knocked them down.
Many were killed. There was much weeping. 
Our people were afraid. All they could see 
was the canyon, so huge their eyes 
could not find the end, or believe that emptiness could ever fill.
Their eyes were clouded with tears. They could not see 
the cramped and airless spaces behind words like 
      bunker buster.

But we say here clearly and hope you will forgive: 

It is a bomb 
that drills through stone, 
then sprays out fuel,
then sets that fuel on fire,
turning people into screaming, writhing lanterns.


* In November 2000, the place of the massacre—in what is now called Chivington, Colorado—was designated a national historic site. Approval of the measure in Congress was, according to Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, “an overwhelming acknowledgement by Americans that we are better than our past.”