Two months later... (for Aviv)

We don't know monuments like the river knows.
A more enduring stillness and still... more fluid sense of time.
A sometimes violent vein of life in the landscape we, with little imagination, call arid.
And leave to the cows and coyotes.

Possessing a patience and faith that shapes landscapes,
water carves ever deeper into stone until canyon walls tower overhead,
blood red and beautiful.
Iconic, silent and fragile.

Red canyons seduce something in my soul.
I am drawn out of myself as I am drawn in.
Something familiar in them if not familial.
The rocks rebound with stories that still echo from an age past, but alive here.

Those stories, both soft and sinister will tell you the histories since before history.
They will tell you the secrets that only stones can keep.
They will sing you songs if you can find their rhythm in your own heartbeat.
And they will weave your own mythology into theirs until you know no other belonging.

We don't know change like a mountain does.
With roots that will never find rest as deep as they dig.
Sitting upon the very shifting center we can only imagine…
and growing taller only to crumble into the plains on scales of time we cannot.