A lost deer's parched nose
Strikes a rust suspension plumed in a trickle of deceptive teal,
Its pitted brain now numb to upstream or down.
Before its clouded eyes and behind,
Red rock whittled layer by layer, stratum by stratum.
The beauty serves its purpose;
Just visible from the outlook are the steps and mazes where spires were leveled,
The rocks peeled back aeon by aeon, contour by contour,
Wound with a ribbon road coursed by
lumbering trucks
Meandering toward
a blurred horizon.
Red to the north, red to the south,
Red above, red to the west from sunset and smoke.
And a leading edge always reporting,
A sfumato of melanin from the west
And a chapped and dirty exodus, grapes long trampled
Tracing in reverse the trails of a partition,
This time fleeing
fire and parched pittances,
universal
but every year dwindling,
and
hearts hardening like anvils
In the
ribs of those who glare in the sun.
So they come, fording the fault,
Summiting
the plateau,
Chiseling the rocks away layer by layer, aeon by aeon,
The meals of the waxing moon claiming the pay of the waning.
On both sides of the Basin, suits and pantsuits
Sign the statutes, write the code,
Pour coin into a river of silicon.
Caked rubber soles stamp the dirt
Trip the
occasional skull in the slag;
The remnants of a spontaneous hill of bones
at
the base of a chasm once sheer
now
carved to a ghost.
Only splinters remain of the field of hulks at the precipice
engines cooling,
keys dangling
towed
away to be melted, recast
And strike the rock in eternal torment.
Any papers blown
away,
The occasional
note still in the cloud.
