I meet a young couple in the canyon. A dog in their company tells me more about them than they guess. I see a piñon pine tree alight with fall sunshine. As I exit the canyon, I discover a prying eye. This is another long and the last installment in this series but it isn’t [...]
In which I make my way into Crossfire Canyon and meet a wondrous bird. I muse upon the experience of eye contact with other species, referencing N. Scott Momaday and Martin Buber. I see the light, loose and free in the canyon–it’s beautiful. Part one here, part two here, part three here.
As I worked [...]
In part three, the mental illness storyline continues, but the mystery of the cause of Mark’s troubles comes somewhat to light. I muse upon the idea that when misfortune besets you, others watching from a distance sometimes suppose you must have done something to deserve it. Just when I think everything’s on the upswing, my [...]
This multiple-part series is from a longer work-in-progress I’ve begun that recounts my experiences in Recapture Canyon in southeast Utah. Woven throughout the longer narrative are my ideas about language’s part in evolution, culture, and relationship–including what language reveals about and how it affects the ways we treat with people who live with what I [...]
Consider Christ our Saviour: an Eventual Pastoral
Divine in nature, nurtured in a crèche
Born to woman, subject to the flesh
In parts and passions ever one of us
Slow to anger, angered nonetheless
Meek and mighty, normal to behold
Man of sorrows, joy of fallen worlds
Bread of life, made hungry by the lack
Twice-crossed Lamb, and bridger of doom’s crack
He is [...]
I’ve had enough of deserts,
Wish to shed my summer clothes
And wear my long-forgotten woolen, warming winter robes.
Want mittened hands, and beating
Round my body in the cold
To ward off frost, to hover over heat and hearth and coals.
Want stockinged feet, and booted,
Want the crunch and whine of snow,
Want the red-cheeked strain of shoveling a passage to [...]
No devil-watered blackberries,
Whose succulence is long past anyway,
Since Winter’s chill blew down the collar of the wood,
Swept clean the dell and dingle, copse and field.
Sweep clean the dell and dingle, halt the yield,
Hibernia’s onset blast! Freeze crop and crud!
They’ll shiver in a gasp of shorter days
And doff their autumn liveries.
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Photo by Robert Moore via Creative [...]
Time held me green and dying, though I sang,
And spun me off the whinnied fields and out of praise
In his big harvest hands ‘til horse and hen and place
Were only memory, then myth, then vacant space
Implacable as Time’s own clockwork face.
And my worn trap-spring sprang,
And I, Time’s time-mocked minion,
Found Death had no dominion after all,
And [...]
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Another stunning pair of pleistocene-rooted aspens, just putting forth their green scales. So strange to come upon such an organism in the desert.
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Scarlet gilia, also called skyrockets. One of my (and local hummingbirds’) favorite spring through summer plants.