APPROACHING STORM

PUEBLO ALTO, CHACO CANYON

from MUSEUM POEMS

For Kirk Gittings*

Lightning strikes have left in death
bodies of teachers and hikers in our lifetimes there.
We’ve missed the hit several times ourselves

in that place where nothing can go wrong,
where lightning’s luck, where no false steps can happen,
no tragedies, no accidents, no truths beyond

what comes to be in a place so powerful
it fills up doubt, fills up fear, fills up
suspicion and even the cynical

demons at work in reason, fills them up
like sand in crevasses, leaves the landscape of the mind
steady as geology is, most of the time.

It is oracular and jubilant to be there
self-making in the ruins from which
the future unfolds in psychic space so real

perfection strikes right over it,
so white, so loud, so free of all
possible constraint, it appears

in the space of your eye, a blink of lighting
like traces of grace in mishaps never come to life.
We have been to Alto, climbed the cliffs, chased down

by thunderheads darker than philosophy,
sure-brained for anything, on snow that makes the lichen
slick as ice, and have survived our chances

to become the future within us; nothing
gets in the way of what will be, though a single
lightning in the mind, one thought, can change it.

*See GittingsPhoto.com, portfolios, Chaco Body for the image of “Threatening Storm, Pueblo Alto.”