Bryce Canyon Collection

Once I wanted to be a writer. Once I even got paid to write. I started digging through old writing, looking for something. I might as well self-publish on my blog. Beware: a series of writing from my early twenties.


I

Limestone:

soft rock, crumbly to the touch,

completely unfit for climbing,

but rather good at falling.

Prime substance for erosion,

ice-wedging, geological processes

before my very eyes.

Limestone welcomes; it lets the water into its pores

in the warmth,

but the water remains indebted to no one

and will freeze as the day turns to night,

popping apart its host

slowly

but surely

until suddenly

the rock falls.

Two hundred nights a year,

freeze thaw freeze thaw.

Fin, window, arch, hoodoo.

(Like holding up your hand

and slowly splitting the fingers apart.)

Hoodoo?

Pinnacle like voodoo.

To cast a spell.

Hoodoo, like a cloud ever changing

and not looking the same to two people with eyes

side by side but different minds to process.

Like a cloud, no two hoodoos look the same.

Hoodoo, like a cloud, changing,

the limestone does not stop welcoming.

Is it voodoo?

Coyote the demigod once welcomed,

but his guests were rude and raucous at his party, 

all of them,

snake, prairie dog, mountain lion,

sometimes looking like people

but all rude and now stone. 

They wore out the welcome and

Coyote turned them into stone. 

The Paiute’s Legend People of the limestone,

lurking in the Amphitheater.