Stand up, sandstone slabs of red,

Tell the overland passengers who burnt you.

Tell ’em how the jacks and screws loosened you.

Tell ’em who shook you by the heels and stood you on your heads,

Who put the slow pink of sunset mist on your faces.

Panels of the cold gray open night,

Gates of the Great American Desert,

Skies keeping the prayers of the wagon men,

The riders with picks, shovels and guns,

On the old trail, the Santa Fe trail, the Raton pass

Panels, skies, gates, listen tonight while we send up our prayers on the Santa Fé trail.

(A colossal bastard frog

squats in stone.

Once he squawked.

Then he was frozen and

shut up forever.)

Into the night the overland passenger train,

Slabs of sandstone red sink to the sunset red,

Blankets of night cover ’em up.

Night rain gods, night luck gods, are looking on.

March on, processions.

Tie your hat to the saddle and ride, O Rider.

Let your ponies drag their navels in the sand.

Go hungry; leave your bones in the desert sand.

When the desert takes you the wind is clean.

The winds say so on a noisy night.

The fingerbone of a man

lay next to the handle of a frying pan

and the footbone of a horse.

“Clean, we are clean,” the winds whimper on a noisy night.

Into the night the overland passenger train,

And the engineer with an eye for signal lights,

And the porters making up berths for passengers,

And the boys in the diner locking the icebox—

And six men with cigars in the buffet car mention “civilization,” “history,” “God.”

Into the blanket of night goes the overland train,

Into the black of the night the processions march,

The ghost of a pony goes by,

A hat tied to the saddle,

The wagon tongue of a prairie schooner

And the handle of a Forty-niner’s pickax

Do a shiver dance in the desert dust,

In the coyote gray of the alkali dust.

And—six men with cigars in the buffet car mention “civilization,” “history,” “God.”

Sleep, O wonderful hungry people.

Take a shut-eye, take a long old snooze,

and be good to yourselves;

Into the night the overland passenger train

And the sleepers cleared for a morning sun

and the Grand Canyon of Arizona.

2

A bluejay blue

and a gray mouse gray

ran up the canyon walls.

A rider came to the rim

Of a slash and a gap of desert dirt—

A long-legged long-headed rider

On a blunt and a blurry jackass—

Riding and asking, “How come? How come?”

And the long-legged long-headed rider said:

“Between two ears of a blurry jackass

I see ten miles of auburn, gold and purple—

I see doors open over doorsills

And always another door and a doorsill.

Cheat my eyes, fill me with the float

Of your dream, you auburn, gold, and purple.

Cheat me, blow me off my pins onto footless floors.

Let me put footsteps in an airpath.