With my love I stand
On the brink of immensity
At once diminished to a speck
And raised up with a presence
I can only describe as divine
As immense as the canyon below me
My love takes my hand
Rests her head on my shoulder
Nothing is so grand as love
I stand upon this grandest rim
Try to imagine unthinkable time
Relent before too long such fruitless task
Instead I’ll contemplate this lazy little rhyme
Through the plateau
The Colorado pickaxe falls
Reveals sedimental sandstone rings
The eons marked on canyon walls
Rock bottom finds the hardest rock
Twelve hundred meters down below
There an ancient granite shield
No deeper can the river go
But wider still
The river’s reach
A force of will
The cliffs be breached
Upstream the river
Has not yet found
The basement rock
So burrows still into the ground
This little peal of green
Winding through the desert red
Cut its path through rising rock
Stone once silt when waterborne
Now to the sea writhes its decay
Perhaps again to stratify
Beauty sculpted
With the softest tools
The utmost patience
Beheld by a mind
For a fleeting moment
Recorded for a moment more
While the sculptor
Chips away
Her pieces ever
Works in progress
Not a one complete
In between
The dead
And the not dead
In between
What is
And what is not
In between
The light
And the not light
There find
The realm
Of possibility
Seen only
By those who conceive
A world without absolutes
Where dreamers dream
Between sleeping
And waking
While the world flows
Between being
And non-being
In the wakening hours we dance
Between self-remembering
And self-forgetting
This is the ebb and flood
Between the conscious
And the unconscious
Like the darkness
And the light
In eternal conflict
Only the master sees
The dominance of either
Is true darkness
While the light burns brightest
In those who come to know
The balance of both
Hard rock cradle of the canyon
Fluffy down comforter in the sky
Below, a river flows
Brings all I see and need to life
I remind myself
Even the gentlest creeks
Carve canyons from bedrock
With the aid of time and tenacity
Embers
spark of life
renews within the valley
Enveloped
in the warm stone
of canyon walls
Emerging
as if from the womb
new life partum
Embraced
by the Earth
matron of time and being
Evermore
the cycle plays and plays again
birth, life, death, rebirth
I love a landscape best
Which is not so self-conscious
As to fear the domination
Of a cloud-illumined sky
In the bright sun of day
I am shadow
A mask without a face
A smile without a reason
Laughter without glee
A sign of existence
Without presence
So I breathe
Bury my hand
In the hot sand
Shout out the pain
Of heat and grief
And emptiness
Give voice
To the being
Which once cast
The shadow
Until the voice
Becomes being
A vessel
For the light
The pain and grief
And emptiness
Become the shadow
Pix to Words 