Greyscale in the Shadow of Delicate Arch

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A good photographer must pull clarity
from rubble like a juiced orange.
Sand soaked in blooded
citrus, this rock no exception to
my lens. For days, no years,
I have wandered in desert and
made tunnels from holes in rocks,
affection from canyons.
We’re just so immediate, aren’t we?
Seen through a nail hole in a hand
I now believe this contorted obelisk.

From Salt Lake on, postcards and license
plates mimic. The giftshop glamour
reminds me the prices of funerals.
In Hurricane I touch one, grazing
embossed symbols punched
in thin metal. Dusted, it
leaps over me from its canvas,
forms new sky and red umbrella.
Under such honorifics most
things appear part of one long
project I have been following
from the first time I cried.

At the bend
of rock I reach one arm through
the hole in its stomach. Brush air
and organs aside, prove that
it and I are real. I now know certainty
encased in a stone envelope.
My telephoto eye flattens,
answers an unwilling
earth. It bucks from the weight
of an image, quakes beneath
my rubber soles and finally
buries its confusions.
A good photographer must pull clarity
from rubble like a juiced orange.