Opened Beneath My Feet
The shadow of a cloud on golden grass
stretching, squinting from horizon to horizon
takes your step to a sudden slide in dimness:
powdery red rocks rising from the canyon gash.
Mesquite trees fight for air and sky,
but all wood, hard and soft, could lose–
the rocks were here
before the Kiowa; before the Comanche,
before the conquistadors, before the cavalry,
before Colonel Goodnight’s men herding
bison among the prickly pear–
a pebble ago, when Texas was new.
I have seen the red cliffs, fed the deer,
splashed through water crossings,
fallen from mountaintops level with the plains,
climbed a smooth white desert jungle gym
of bleached trees piled in tangles
beside a muddy trickle, once a flash flood.
I thought I heard the water lapping up
layer by colored layer, wide bands and narrow,
to drown, then dry to dust to drought to dust of snow–
bands like a coral snake coiled around
an arrowhead, a hoofprint, a carving in the rock.
Silent like a rattler you’re about to startle.
From the red dust floor I lift my eyes
to cliffs like blood, or winter sunset.
Lisa Bolin Hawkins
When I was a little girl living in Amarillo, Texas, my father would take my sister and me to Palo Duro Canyon (palo duro is Spanish for “hard wood”), carved by the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River in the Texas Panhandle. We’d drive down on the single-lane road, splashing through water crossings created as the stream wended around, and we had a special place where the stream had washed up trees into a jungle gym that had bleached white in the unforgiving summer sun. We’d roast hot dogs and marshmallows and feed hot dog buns to the trusting deer, who were not hunted in that state park. We’d climb the red rocks, careful of the slippery, powdery dust or sliding pebbles, watching for rattlesnakes. Sometimes on the local news we’d hear that there had been flash floods in the canyon and that campers and hikers had to be rescued by helicopter. The canyon has been noted in histories from the earliest Native Americans forward as an amazing, beautiful, wild place that appears unexpectedly in the flat plains.
Sisterly Kindness 