The two poems draw on a trip through the northeastern part of Arizona and to our well known Canyon de Chelly, the jpgs are of some watercolous that are “abstractions” with the red rock landscape in mind that match what happens in the poems. David Chorlton
Canyon de Chelly
The rain turns around and begins
to flow back into the sky. A low cloud
grips a mesa with its talons
and pulls it from the surface of the Earth
revealing one more red rock canyon
filled with souls. The walls are marked by clawing
where they tried to climb out.
History
curls up at the edges
and the open spaces tear apart as easy
as ripping up a treaty.
A dark heat settles over the land.
There are no ladders any more
to reach houses built into
the walls, but those between the houses
and the sky
remain in place
for access to join a hawk in flight.
Easy now to navigate
the cliffs, circle columns rising
from the stony ground, and balance
on the heat. To fly
and not be followed, settle high
where nobody can reach
and be a spirit leaving when
the body can’t hold on.
Navajo Landscapes
The road remembered glides
with no effort across
flat country that ends in a brushstroke dragged
along a sky soaked in water
where the weight of it
rests while the edges bloom into the land’s
imagination.
Rocks the ground
can no longer contain
stand up as landmarks for anyone
who needs to know
where they are going,
but which
direction hardly matters.
The landscape’s inner life reveals
a kind of loneliness. It’s easy
to feel lost where the Earth arcs
and the sun is balanced
on its highest point
like the destination
at journey’s end, when the way
there is by holding
to the underside of a cloud
as it follows the broken yellow line
to infinity.
David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. His poems have appeared in many publications online and in print, and often reflect his affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. His newest collection of poems is Unmapped Worlds from FutureCycle, and The Bitter Oleander Press published Shatter the Bell in my Ear, his translations of poems by Austrian poet Christine Lavan