The waitress at the Grand Canyon Tells a long story as she re-fills our coffee About her sister on tranquilizers in a taxicab In a crack-up in Spanish Harlem, Turns out she and I were both born In Mount Sinai Hospital, I dream recurringly about upper Broadway The place where I entered the world. Geologic time is all the view here The river cut down not just through layers of stone But through eons, past fossils Of razor clams and oysters Through sandstone, through the metamorphic. Like the mind, it isn't exactly Seeking something, Just going down. Bottom of the canyon is black Vishnu Schist Although Hindu tourists complain These levels are marked all wrong Creator-Destroyer-Preserver Labelled by some 19th century enthusiast In no particular order. The Japanese tourists lined on the rim Photograph it all like Shinto snapshots. I once stood, a tourist myself, At the rim of red rock Canyon de Chelly With my father When a pleasant Mid-Western man beside us exclaimed "Look what God has made!" My father insisted, "Not God, sir. Nature." Appalling the man, embarrassing his own children A cheerful atheist On the edge of the precipice. Here, the river is God's hand. Excavate this earth And you will find A badly chipped blue teapot Or farther back The killed Mimbres bowl A hole shattered for the dead In the center of the design The black and white fish in yin and yang. A woman builds a tower on the rim Tower of stone, this architect Who lived alone Childless, without a man Built masonry to extend her sight Over the updraft of ravens, wind like the sea Farsight from the edge of the known Lighthouse, watchtower, observatory, ruin.© Miriam Sagan
The poem first appeared in Inadvertant Altar, La Alameda Press, 2000.