At Glen Canyon National Recreation Area


we come to see up close
the concrete ramp and famous

110-foot bathtub ring, desiccated dregs
the color of fiasco and cash-

register dreams. We roll our kayaks
in the clear warm broth of nostalgia

and glide in the shadow of the 70-story
concrete plug: the Colorado River

Storage Project (CRSP), engineered
to aid the reclamation of arid

and semi-arid lands, to light up Phoenix
and Las Vegas and even parts of LA

where I stayed up late in childhood
burning electricity, to girder

a cow town called Page into
a multi-million-dollar industry

and level out the flow, drowning
a wild river in a reservoir

breaking the extremely unstable
irascible body that can roar

through the canyon in a gigantic flood
or fall back after the melt

and trickle quietly, unproductively
all summer long.

*

At 2 a.m., three days ago, the doctor
called to say your 90-year-old mother

has presented to the ER in extremis
with sepsis and no advance directive,

do you want us to administer anti-biotics
and fluids? Behind the dam,

alluvium rises by increments every week,
greening the waters of the Colorado

silt-free, crystalline and clear
the way anti-biotics clear up the infection,

scouring the small intestine
killing friendly and unfriendly bacteria.

In the informational film from 1963
machines of heavy construction

and detonation bring new voices
to the land of the Navaho. The narrator says

the lake is a man-made natural wonder,
a meandering and warm companion

to the cold-water dam-controlled
waters of the Grand. Drain Lake Powell?

I don’t think so, one commentator insists
over variations on the theme of “Wayfaring Stranger.”

*

From the plane it dazzles, turquoise
and verbose, a branching curved

many coved, multi-legged and headed
arthropod or dragon, spreading wings

and pointing emptying fingers at the
desert business. An intimacy. A jewel.

With water levels almost at dead pool
canyon sites are re-emerging,

ghostly mirrors shrouded in chalky brown gray.
Floyd Dominy says we didn’t have to relocate

anything–there was nothing there but artifacts,
like the sickle carved from mountain

sheep horn in Lizard Alcove, a bag
of cotton seeds, a yucca leaf sandal

and jar of salt left in Benchmark cave
beside the ash ring from a fire

for roasting Yucca hearts in springtime—
a saygee bowl (late Pueblo) still stained

from a meal left unfinished
when the unnamed and unknowable Anasazi

were interrupted by calamity or worn down
by drought. Oak set glens, fern-

decked alcoves, mounded billows
of orange sandstone. 125 side canyons

each one of them different each one
with a look and a voice and a feeling of its own.

*

It’s a half hour paddle to cross Wahweap Bay
to Antelope Island’s drowned coves

and sandless shore. Though no one
wants to see or touch the sludge-

stained bottom, and no one is permitted
to touch the body of a first love turned contagious,

quarantined and undone by medicine
in fevered writhing, in a hospital room,

I put my bare hand against the face,
coating my fingertips in drought,

murmur and fiasco. The silt stays
on my fingers like an aftertaste.

That night before I went to sleep
in my orange tent, surrounded by RVs

I check my phone and learn the c-diff is back
just like I expected, feverishly colonizing

and competing with the healthy flora
eroding the walls of the small intestine.

For now, I move closer put my palm, then a cheek
against the silted Navaho sandstone

furrowed by crinoid fragments and vertebral smears,
the slight indentation where a small

unnamed reptile scraped its claws along
the muddy bottom as it swam.

The Air Outside


Now the air outside
that is inside is the matter
and what’s the matter—

the pathetic fallacy that covers
surfaces and certainties
glazing both the glass and window

sill, my objective correlative
for what I cannot feel
as everything extinguishes around us.

This smoke is the smoke
on the other side of inside
extending across time zones

and mountain ranges, turning
the sun earlobe pink through windowpanes
even on the Eastern side of the continent.

Double quarantined, I taste the cigarettes
I gave up years ago, coating my tongue
and lips, my hair and the fingertips

that reach through a malign fog
to brush the needles and branches
of the thirsty Jeffrey pine that may be next.