bone-white barnacles left a shod line
on its grey gneiss and granite,
opposite to coal on porcelain
from the stoker’s first bath
after crossing the Atlantic.
As water swirled to a drain
mooring ropes coiled to rattle snakes
in undertow arroyos, where buoys sunk
to neat rows of bison skulls,
and the eiders that dove the lengths of these ropes
grew forelegs, long ears and black tails
that caught on rusty lures
of goat’s head and prickly pears;
and gillnets tangled with ossified salmon
to tumble across an alkali wash,
and outside saloons in the movies.
Now the stoker took a job as a fireman
on the railroad, and each time he passed above
the fjord on a bridge, he exclaimed,
I brought Lysefjorden across and painted it red!
Many came to see, but soon wanted more:
a settlement of undivided light
is what they wished for,
and from the desert a dazzling dome arose
to rival the horizon, with a sea’s river-thirst
in its Imperial Gulp:
An inhospitable place has anyhow been made
of the fjord, and those people who knew how to make
a canyon a home are in large numbers gone, and so,
the commissioner announced, we’re flooding Glen Canyon.
And the fjord was like a fjord, almost up to its mark.
