Matter flung, mysterious highway,

Snake wrapped sandstone fingers

Brushing sky, mesa piercing impossible balance.

What once was a city of imagination,

Is now a forest of dry grottos.

River flush with frigid melting,

Howling down, sculpting down

The tiers, opaque windows

To million suns past of

Painted rock striation.

Water, white power fluid hysteria,

Is the artist of revelation,

In one moon more, though, dries to dust.

Yet another year, burrowing into

A past of bone and ammonite etching,

Burns the desert hollows.

Canyon calls to the

Ephemeral ancient ocean,

The evaporated image

Of lush life

Laid over parched spires

And wounds in the earth;

Laid over as if currents

Of memory giving flesh to fossils.

Bones of shuttling pasts,

Rune remains shape the

Vision of a hotter sun,

And waves among the mute towers.

Intricate marks across a page of sky,

Formations fall into the green ways,

That are full of fields,

Turnings thrown wildly through hills,

Through hollow imaginings:

The ways of mellow birds,

Flocking northern geese

Patterned black and grey,

With the white sign of bondage

To austral navigation.

Stopping in the wayside wetlands,

Surrounded by films of ice and

Drying reeds, they collect in the canon

Of colour, as the language of autumn

Drives them toward an equinoctial reverse,

Toward a consummation with a history

Of gold-filled galleons,

A season that has passed, as will

The frozen air of the hemisphere they abandon

Both before and after the oceans swallow

Conscious migrations.