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A SLEEP OF SAND AND SALT
by JoSelle Vanderhooft
This is how the Great Salt Lake dreams:
in pools reflecting vanished continents,
verdigris plankton and honed glaciers
scraping blue from sky lost to the waking world.
Lazy as a seal upon the beach,
the great lake turns inside his banks.
In the bubble-up of sediment,
the brine-fly hop,
the digestive stink of his saline intestine,
he remembers what was lost,
and mourns in his sheet of steam.
This is how the Great Salt Lake remembers:
in prism pieces, mostly, that bend
time into an arching spectrum,
fragments of color falling like glass rain.
First there is the vanished pluvial lake
arching red beneath a dawn-trout’s jump to heaven.
Next there are the orange popping
sun-bubbles in the yellow mirror of waves.
Then, the spreading green of ancient grass
where mammoth, chipmunk, maybe bison
kneel to quench their thirst in trembling blue.
The indigo of evening falls so fast,
he scarcely remembers it when violet
rings the great tectonic mountains like a halo.
Though he is sleepy, he has heard men say
time moves in cycles: morn to noon to night
and back again sure as frost and freeze.
But inwardly he knows this is not so.
Time is a fractured thing of shards and knives:
here the shifting of a bank
there an evaporating, a new salty plane
there a watermark dried like a scar
diminishing,
diminishing
like sand that that hardens
eons in volcanoes.
Down and down he’s shrunk with his coastlines
to this, his present state:
a curious sea backed by a pale-veined desert,
salt and sand the only vestiges
of his Pleistocenic empire.
Like Leviathan beneath the tide,
the great lake moans and stirs along his shores.
In the drift of morning,
the mountain sun,
the silence of the city at his back,
he remembers the mystery he has gained
and smiles contently in the speckled dawn.
JoSelle Vanderhooft
Desert Songs (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2008)