Crossing Colorado

Black Canyon National Park

Juniper High Above Black Canyon © 2013 Bo Mackison

The Fourth Day – East Across Colorado

A half-dozen times I’ve circled Black Canyon National Park on vacation maps
and a half-dozen times we lingered too long at Arches or Canyonlands,
and Black Canyon was scratched. Who even knows there is such a place as
Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park anyway?

Now you can count me among its visitors, I’ll keep its secret.
Here are steep cliffs, ancient rock, craggy spires,
and walls streaked with dragon outlines, erosion’s art work
on rocky canvas 2000 feet from flowing river to cliff edge.

Black Canyon National Park

Black Canyon National Park © 2013 Bo Mackison

Oh, the quiet places, open spaces, vertical wilderness
shared with soaring hawks and eagles.
Cloud cover kept the canyon in shadow, but the river’s song
sounded on the high mesa and wildflowers bloomed
in the roots of twisted junipers.

Twenty years getting here and I had only half a day
to see what I had missed, a half day to know I’ll return.
When the wind gusts spiked at 50 mph, I knew I’d pushed my luck,
but a tail wind pushed me half-way across Colorado.

Stranded Boat Dock - Curecanti NRA

Stranded Boat Dock © 2013 Bo Mackison

Colorado has fine scenery, but those low gray clouds packed with snowy potential
overwhelmed my yearn to pull over and explore.
Still, there was plenty to see –
the up and down rhythm of mountain, valley, mountain.
Tumbleweeds skirted the highways.

Cimarron, Colorado. Conjurer of Wild West.
Lakes half filled, driftwood sculptures lace the sandy edges.
And colors bleached by winter’s touch take on color — 
greening grasses, tree twigs in muted yellows, pinks, rusty reds,
Weeping willows in yellow-green tangles.
Calves snooze in muddy pastures,
content as their mothers graze nearby.

Dust Storm at Curecanti NRA

Dust Storm at Curecanti © 2013 Bo Mackison

Dust clouds swirl around my car at Curecanti.
I stop at another ranger station,
it’s a slow day for recreation, the staff ply me with coffee, maps,
highlight the safest route through the eastern mountain passes.
Another hawk sweeps past my car, hawks are my companion bird this trip.

San Isabel National Forest.
Steepy Mountain.
And then Monarch Pass. Fitting, Monarch is the pass to bid me farewell
as I cross the Continental Divide and head towards the plains.

Salida and a stop at Sally’s Cafe for coffee.
The road follows the Arkansas River,
running with spring melt, thunder-crashing into protruding red rock.
Fly fishermen queue for prime locations.

In the high desert town of Cañon City
I watch the last hawk of the day —
dancing, sky diving, it welcomes the evening.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. A cross-country traveler by day, and an occasional poet. This is a poem in nine parts, because the trip lasts nine days. This is day four!

Traveling East, A Spring Greening

The greening of the trees in spring rain,
see-through trees like a lacy negligee, the nesting bird
watches from the half-leafed trees.

Traveling in the Rain

Rain Travel © 2012 Bo Mackison

Calves balancing on gentle hills rub their noses in the wet grasses.
One stands wobbly, leans against its mother.
Others watch their mothers watching them, nibble a bit, suckle,
wander about the remains of last fall’s tattered harvest.

Darkest brown, Iowa’s earth, earth that dips
and dances. We’ve driven past the Kansas grasslands,
and not yet reached the prairie flat of Illinois.

See the family plot tucked tightly between
the edge of the woods and the tilled field;
Splintered posts and strands of wire mark its boundary.
Roughly hewed stones, two rows of three, the mossy inscriptions illegible.
Though one, a mother’s marker, is split in half – part upright,
part broken off and tipped into the rain-soaked grass.
The roughened quarry block, now a rest stop for crows,
splats of white the only sign of life.

Clouds hang gray, so low I yearn to stand
and push them high into the skies, high enough to punch an opening into the dim blueness
that is Midwestern sky, give sunlight to the earth.
Yet fog lingers, sky primed in deep grays.

We pass a highway sign, What Cheer, population 142. Twenty miles south.
I wish to see a town worthy of this name, but we’re on the fourth morning of steady travel.
There is no will to detour.
Tonight we sleep in the familiar ridges and valleys of our familiar bed.

First I will say hello to the house I left a hundred days ago,
walk through the rooms I know by memory, peer out the back window at the apple tree.
I’m told no blossoms remain.

Oklahoma, Gray Skies, and a White Truck

White Truck © 2012 Bo Mackison

I bought a primitive statue of a woman last summer from a stone sculptor the next booth over.
She toppled in a winter storm. My husband mentions this
as he pulls into the Save-n-Go in Dubuque for gas and coffee.

Tomorrow morning I’ll push her upright so we can watch the garden together.
We will meet, eye to eye, and reflect on the greenness of Midwest spring.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. After four days of cross-country travel, Bo is back home in the Midwest.