Roll Call in the Utah Desert

I smell the sun on my blue lizard back,

move not at all, flick my eye

when cloud passes over

the dust of my gray hill

at the foot of the Henries,

sere, dry, still…

wait, something…

I scurry.

They call me sidewinder.

I slither sideways.

If you lift my rock

I’ll be gone, angular

and fluid as water

that once flowed

in this yellow arroyo.

I am the mule deer with long ears

who lives in arid lands

too hot for humans to walk.

When the spring rains surprise me,

thunder across the sky,

the Fremont runs red as rust

from the sand of Moenkopi,

that red pavement of the desert floor,

eroded by light.

I am asleep

when the first wave comes down the river,

a line of dry juniper berries

marking the rush over the top of the water.

I leap up at the ruckus.

I jump away from the cliff base,

my green bed, into the water,

into the flood of fear and the roar,

to cross, to cross to the flats

on the other side.

I can’t swim. Here I am, floundering.

I float downstream, gain a hoofhold,

leap free.

You won’t see me. You may see

my lion scat, my long tail

as I blur away from the canyon

as you trail in.

Elusive, I am. Power

is my nature. Raw meat

is what I eat, wild and hungry.

I am slinky, sure of foot,

leaving the print of my paw

in the mud by the river,

no tracks at all on the arid

emptiness I travel, the vast.

I sit in the waterfall

made by the engineers

where route 24 curves

through Capitol Reef.

I let it pound me

in the high-noon heat.

My skin reddens

from sun and water.

I smell the alkaline soil

and the heat of the lava rock,

black now for millenia, as it turns

from its mountain bed

near the crater, basalt,

white where it stayed in place

in the soil,

its round face to the sun.

I am the silence,

even under the waterfall.

Photographs: Capitol Reef by Wolfgang Staudt; lizard and mountain lion courtesy of National Park Service; Fremont River falls by Colin Guthrie.