CANYONLANDS NATIONAL PARK

by Jeffrey Taylor

 

 

A suicidal pheasant
offered himself to me

as sunrise
peeled the thin skin off

a dreaming canyon.

The tree-line and hills cracked
knuckles.

This silly bird snapped his own neck
against a hackberry stump.

So strange.

I gathered him up—
quietly

mourning.
On the hood of my truck,

desert heat loosened soft meat
from bird-ribs and bird-spine.

Now a funeral has come, the moon,
corpse-white over the valley.

I prod coals with a stick
in my limestone fire pit.

Coal pebbles sputter
raspy hisses.

Tomorrow I’ll make a fine tobacco
purse from the bladder

and feathers: sierra-brown,
navajo-mud-red.

 

 

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