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.

William Shunn

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This poem was originally published in Sunstone, February 1994.

A desert landscape with sandstone arch is seen overlaid on the salt-crusted rear window of a hatchback automobile.
Photographs licensed from Bigstock. Montage by William Shunn.

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.

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William Shunn

Writer, poet and puzzle maker. Hugo and Nebula Award finalist. Author of The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary. He/him/Bill.