Escalante as it Meets Lake Powell
by El Bentivegna
after Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Now you see how things turn out, the swollen
blue soap bottle tipping toward his open
mouth, a thousand pounds of gray gravel trucked
in from California or Ohio or Florida.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this: his mind like
water, her wondering if he remembered, the tremors
that threatened to cleave the red rock under the house
into an endless arroyo. Him as a boy with brothers
and almost a century before them. Him and her
in creased photographs next to wood-paneled walls,
overflowing with parenthood, bracketed by youth.
Her neck cricks as she jerks toward
the bird whose cry she doesn’t recognize, eyes
fixed to the one limp ponderosa palm across
the parking lot, picking bits of his peeling scalp
from her silk pillow. Place-outside-a-place, longing
for belonging in her body in their low house
that was his house until it wasn’t. Away he was
led to the hospital bed, where he cried when the nurses
laid their cracked hands. To see a place through mud
-colored glasses, all the green peeled
from its veins and everything dust, rusted latches
on the poolside gate, spiny stars guarding. A lone
coyote’s moan weaves through the window. On
the horizon the neon and strobe and fluorescence
pulses, effervescent liquor no longer a slippery
mistress, though the half-empty bottle still
sits flat in the fridge. Sometimes she finds
the dead dog’s hair in the couch cushions.
Decades away the river carves a canyon
soft through the sand, soft like the afghan
he cradled the baby in, when their daughter
still lived down the road. Bones shattered, synapses
swallowed, family gathered, fractured as a beam of light:
it was always going to be like this.