Late morning sun slants over the canyon’s deserted walls,
strafing through Cottonwood's towering heights,
and, onto, the San Francisco River’s shallowed waters;
diamonds and starbursts jitter and dance.
Behind Copper Mountain’s buffering cliffed fortress
the intensive mining of man’s metal-need continues.
An aura of drowsiness shimmers in the air, here,
as cicadas timelessly hum and drone.

Standing on the edge of the threading bank,
the decision is made to travel upriver,
adventuring into history’s roiling silence,
echoing with sharp bird calls, lizard scuttlings
and splashing footstep’s passage back in time.

Raggedy barbwire slants with the weight
of scabrous fence posts, weaseling through tarbrush,
and disappearing up the cacti slope.
Undercarriage of miniature ore car reposes,
rustily weeping its memories into the present.
Above, two mine adits gibber soundlessly,
their weakened walls supporting spider’s webs,
shakily upholding the formation of Man-made Time.

The river forks, rushes with trilling laughter
out into the open, on the right, but to the left,
visions of feathery pink-tipped Tamarisks beckon
as they curtsy to the whispers of river life with
lush curves of shallow water, minnows darting,
caterpillars treading tiny rafts of floating plants, and
water bugs rowing their bloated bodies, living
as they did a hundred years ago,in this niche.

A 1930’s icebox door sprawls its straight lines garishly.
As a fin-backed relic auto, twisted and warped,
is securely impaled by a mesquite’s thick branch.
Nearby, a wood-floored panel truck of ancient design,
intentionally placed and crushed by large boulders-
an Old-Timer’s solution to bank erosion from monsoon floods-
is now incongruously absorbed into the river’s restructured line.

Receding back to the future, the flare of deserts daytime heat
dispels the mirage of prospecting the past, the edges of Life
have blurred beyond memory, the river flows, the cliffs are silent,
as cicadas timelessly hum and drone.

Erin Elizabeth Kelly-Moen
© Copyright 5/28/03
Copyright 2003 ©