Spring Canyon Bottom

Rock presides,
its uncreasing knuckles rap
on the back of waterfalls, paused:
lilac, rust and cream.
A biopsy,
striped by the same mason
that crumbles it in breeze
storms, blinding:
gusty Moments act upon
their father History, their mother,
bearer of the body
that bears this oldest skin.



Hey Joe Canyon

A river vein in soft rock
meanders green
to defy the blue aluminum
littered at its bends.
By spit and squint the cold sun chaperones
this liminal space,
this practiced arc of day,
when Green births Blue
on a straw-stuffed fainting bed
and Blue dies humbly at the whim
of a friendly firing squad:
ten thousand combinations
of dirt and shadow brown.

Overhot kernels we pop and buck beside
the border of the dredge
under a skittering reach of Tamarisk
who squeaks its pleas on wire, and canvas, and
sand-kissed panes.
Down the steepest side we think we spot
a giant fishhook or perhaps
the anchor of a mythical ship
lost in the heave of a mythical flood.
But the twist of iron turned out to be
so much less romantic:
an abandoned mining site,
that, once raked bare,
was left alone with the river vein
to be bearded by needles
and Queen Anne's Lace.



Leaving Spring Canyon Bottom

Lisping through S-curves
of pastel rangeland
The sun changes things:
It paints faces,
Builds hotels,
And knits giant tea-cosies
For miniature igloos.
We stop to kick out baby-heads
And hurl them beyond the rock lip
Down the rock throat.
Their voice-crash comes back
Then away and back,
Echoing to compensate
For what must stay unseen.



On the Drive to Gemini Bridges

Toward the white-salted mountains
The only motion is emotion
The only traction is attraction;
Nothing left behind or leaving.
I make the way
I make a white road lined
By a crust less white and more living;
Tracing from the thumbhole of
The painter's pallet and among
Its clots of color swirling.
The sky an always-ready canvas
Un-scrolls, still spreading;
The sky awaiting its inscription
Blank, but not quite white.



The Bride Spire

What had been a riverbed now sprawls out,
made million-years soft for her
sloping belly to rest in the purple shadow
of her own hip bone.
Tan, lips and heels relax en vrac
among sunken eye sockets
and nasal passage caverns.
In a heap she lays, the sum of them,
made soft and wet by wind,
made hard and cracked from waiting.



Delicate Arch

We, like so many, stalk the Delicate Arch
Not because of its beauty
Not because of its fame
We, like so many, stalk the Delicate Arch
Because as with all things delicate
We know it will collapse

Ekleksographia:
Wave Three

May, 2010

Poetry

Eliza Kane

A native of Vermont, Eliza C. Kane is a writer and translator currently teaching and completing a Masters in English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where her work on utopian landscape ideology in American literature has developed into their first ever critical/creative hybrid thesis project. Other creative and non-fiction work have appeared in publications such as Inertia Magazine and Stranded in Stereo.