Waiting On A Paiute’s Plateau
I know a Kaibab where Paiutes pummeled ground
with their paints, soft soled ponies with hand of warrior
on their shoulders. Creation’s canvas canyon
whispers rise to remembering ear as ancient echoes
from beneath hushed skirt and ponderosa’s hem,
there came a son with language scrolling river rush of words
that winged on feather-sharp slope of colored stone
drawn up like mist to rainbow make
an arch of hope on further lands
where dry lips crack and breasty mounds
slump in wait for such recompense
as slurries from a prism’d sky.
Horse-sweat climb and shadowed lace on journeys taken,
metronome drop of hooves to mark the meter
of soliloquy formed like gem deposit in mind of man
soft-handing reins so path is purchased by holy fate;
sight and sound, of revelation’s ancestral hum
that makes sense to this man’s gathering
of the holy and the harbored that is unearthed
to be spread out on buckskin plied
by patient scraping of his hunter’s trove.
Poetry is revealed through cleared sight, and by means
of sifting through the common and the clumped is separated
from its overlooked commonness
to become testaments, even treasures, when handed to us
who wait for Moses who know what path to take,
what bush to sit beside, what exact phrases we have need to know.
From spectacular rim of canyon’s drop, the Phoenix rises
with wisdom clung between its claws; not commandments, rifling
in press and push of wingspan, but poetry to feed a multitude
of dry-mouthed protégées who wish for ways to embellish
the changes in geography through soulful rearrangement of senses.
©Carol Desjarlais
Written as tribute to an amazing poet
Kaibab Plateau’s meadows and forests of dense ponderosa pine and mixed conifer to the brink of the spectacular north rim of the Grand Canyon, 1,000 feet higher than the south rim. Kaibab” as the Paiute Indians called it.
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