Salt Crusted on Automotive Glass
Between me and the decadent majesty of the salmon-red cliffs of eastern Utah, a ghost landscape stands sentinel. A poem.
This poem was originally published in Sunstone, February 1994.
Between me, safe in my seat on this bus,
and the decadent majesty of the salmon-red cliffs of eastern Utah,
a ghost landscape stands sentinel,
as if etched into the glass by a cadre of capering goblins.
The residue of a hasty window washing —
loops and whorls of dirt left untouched, uncleansed,
unrepentant, at the bottom of the glass on each fluid upstroke —
it sparkles, gritty and salt-sharp in the oblique sunlight,
like a series of pearly solar flares,
or a graph of the desert’s pulsebeat,
or spectral negatives of a washed-out sandstone arch,
photographed in stages over eons of time —
snapshots from a child-god’s flip-book —
frothing, leaping, peaking, then falling back into the ground
like fountains of earth,
a time-lapse planetary signature
that will melt and return to dust
with the next unlikely rain.