Twelve Hundred Miles West

Right now, on my computer screen web camera of Zion Ntnl Park
the canyon wall, east side of the park, off US-9,

is an impressionist painting, in a gray period,
(albeit pixilated by my screen’s resolution)

if I disregard the tiny points of red & blue, who do not belong,
& focus on the levels of gray: charcoal to nearly black,

contrasting with the almost white, cracked bits of eggshell
in the coffee soot, though no yellow, no thread of gold or red,

I can make out the familiar points and curves in silhouette,
the lines that cut & are cut by wind—in this season:

sleet even, sheets of hoary fog or frost, in ripples
(on the same screen two hours later as I type)

the high desert’s low points curtained in coverlets of cold.
It is below zero here in America’s middle:

the corn & wheat & beans are down,
the great northern birds have arrived, landing to shuffle

& collect—to gather together in droves, in dozens
next to the blowing & melting & freezing drifts.

I imagine a high desert cougar, not pictured through
camera’s lens & rarely by the trained & discerning eye,

finding a cold but blast-cutting cave to lick the salt-sand walls
making a primitive painting in coiling DNA of what it means to survive.