the fossil record

<<15>>

Colorado River Poem

Unbroken flexing momentum

of blue-green earthbound thunder

bursting white upon itself :

collisions caught in sandstone & gneiss,

long-grooven cosmogonies lodged

in sedgebank parties

of wading heron :

manifold rim-thrusted tributaries

banging deathly pure

seeking flattest reach,

riffling under pagoda buttes,

sluiced at each thirsty town :

sometimes a thick ferrous swath

atop bare schist,

tangled in tamarisk :

at other bends a knuckly palisade

at the placid gray murk under

elephant-faced cliffs :

the labyrinths of Flaming Gorge, Yampa

& Desolation

as one-armed Powell saw it

in crazed insistence,

touched to his marrow

by Permian time :

finally spread irretrievably thin

as a neutral sheet

of fleshless spent silver :

a sip wedged at the basin

of planetary conclusion--

the drying muck of

alluvial Yuma plain.

Clint Frakes