scarps & hoodoos, breakaway ridges

& stone windows. Scree slopes spill

clean to the creek’s snowmelt flood ruts,

bright, tiny stars of whitlow grass, lashings

of red willow. At our backs the coyote sky

makes of the playa a bright, lying lake,

& far, far below run dozens of miles

of uranium tunnels, the toothless maw

of the mine when we stand before it

the size of a child. Not this one, but this

one—my daughter, who shakes her head,

who straightens up to her full height.