.

Canyon

I’m traveling on a road down which I’m cast,
a road that I am fitted for, no doubt,
since I can see in arid skies white buffaloes,
and humpbacks breaching from basaltic dirt.

And too I can imagine I’m a fossil,
straining my scapulas to almost breaking
to rise reborn, some tortured Dantean figure,
to breathe once more the air where once were seas.

I walk along and scale the red escarpments
and think of wind and ice and flowing water,
of how to capture canyon in one word.
It starts inside the hollow of my throat,

but like the crescent, falls into the dusty
west where jewels and pools and other treasure
lies buried in the dark Precambrian,
or somewhere in my brain’s own unconformities.

.

.

Brian Palmer’s chapbook, Prairiehead, was published by Kelsay Books in 2023. He is the editor of the literary journal, THINK, and currently lives in Juneau, Alaska. 

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9 Responses

    • Brian Palmer

      Thanks, Susan. Good to hear from you! I very much enjoy writing in blank verse and use it for a perponderance of my work, but I love the carefully placed occassional internal or end rhyme, as well as creating other sound echoes, the latter so fitting, of course, with the primary image here of a canyon.

      Reply
      • Brian

        Oh, my. One of my demon spelling words: *occasional

  2. Brian Yapko

    Brian, I really enjoy blank verse and your poem is simply beautiful — the imagery is vivid (a fossil reborn… superb!) and I am impressed by your stunning use of meter. The language is so gorgeous there’s no need for rhyme. There are some contexts where, as here, blank verse is simply the right choice. In fact, rhyme would have made this meditation overly cloying. A very nice touch to add a foot to the last line to manifest your “brain’s own unconformities.” I think this is a marvelous piece and I hope to see more of your work.

    Reply
    • Brian Palmer

      Thanks, Brian! I too enjoy and write often in blank verse. I love bv’s unique potential for organizing a poem’s structure, its pace, and its overall movement, utilizing its enjambment and syntactical flexibility. I debated that last line for some time. In the end, I decided on adding the “somewhere” so that it would have the unconforming extra foot, but with the ambiguity that perhaps it is a pentameter line with 2 hypermetrical syllables. It ties in with the ambiguity of the treasures addressed–of whether he is speaking of actual, even if absent/lost, treasure of precious stones, fossil records, hypothetical formations, etc., or those treasures of metaphor and rhymes and such that he references in the first stanza as someone who strives to explore things from a metaphorical, verbal standpoint. I’m happy you made that comment! Thank you!

      Reply
  3. Paul Freeman

    Some timeless personificatiin and imagery imagery brings rocks, fossils and geological formations to life.

    Great stuff, Brian.

    Reply
    • Brian Palmer

      Thank you for the comments on this poem, Paul. I am an avid walker and so much of what I see, even things apparently inanimate, is evocative of life and will.

      Reply
  4. Margaret Coats

    Brian, the motion and corresponding emotion in your poem are intriguing. The first line suggests “downcast” as the mood, and the travel appears to go down into the canyon in stanzas 1 to 2, perhaps to climb out in stanzas 2-3 (rising reborn and scaling escarpments), and fall back in stanza 4 to lie buried. The process is both a physical journey and a mental one. The words “crescent” and “unconformities” have meanings mathematical and geophysical. How to capture “canyon” in one word is an obvious conundrum. It is one word–and the title of your poem using more words to portray it. You capture my interest!

    Reply
    • Brian Palmer

      Thank you, Margaret! Your comments are truly appreciated. I am happy you see the rise and fall motif of this poem, the going down then climbing up, etc., as I am fascinated by and write often about the idea of emergence, the “constant flow” of things, that is, change. Rising layers of rock is the primary cause of what makes for deep canyons; whales rise out of water, while fossils are buried in time; and the evening cresent is waxing moon, though it “falls” to the west. And you hit on the main idea I was hoping to convey: that all the separate things put together, the physical, the mental, the extant, and the extinct make a whole canyon (and a journey), much more complex and awesome than its individual parts, which this speaker is trying to understand. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your ideas with me.

      Reply

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