I have to say something about the blue grasses by the side of the road,
the red rock rising behind them, a lacy kind of scrub juniper,
yellow-green in afternoon light, dotted here and there up the broken slope

and walls scraped sheer, the red striated with bars of gold and brown.
I have to tell how two greasy ravens startled from their perch
made a raucous noise in the slot canyon. Their cries bounced upward

magnified by a hundred where I had just been singing Amazing Grace
and they had not stirred, the only hymn whose verses I reliably remember.
My boots raised puffs of fine red dust behind me walking back to the car.

I should mention that the aspen leaves were thumbnail-sized and vivid,
that anvil clouds quickly overtook the sun, that before I saw those thirty-seven
white-tailed deer I was feeling unbearably lonely and I might as well confess

how acutely I miss the man I left at home even though I drove
two thousand miles away from him to figure out which one of us to love.