Sunset Grand Lake

(August 2022. Written from a mountain site overlooking Grand Lake, Colorado. Part of a pair with Grand Lake Sunrise from the next morning. Related to my many Colorado River related poems, soon to be collected as “Desert Water.” Also representative of this sort of Gen Z nature mourning poetry, something I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this decade.)

Sunset Grand Lake

The soul of the southwest is made whole here,
This deep and natural lake as close as we can get
To the source of the Colorado, the antechamber of Godhead
Destined for the desert.

The true source is of course
Always
flowing down from high mountains,
Always
going from glaciers to melted streams,
Tiny and many, no one source and all source,
And before, wisps of water vapor, whispers…
If you follow the flow far back enough you go
In a circle through nothing to the water of yourself.

But here, gathered, a single symbol,
The holding of the headwaters of the Grand River,
Grand Lake, where for our purposes
A beginning can be identified, pulled together,
The thinness of this water’s origins thingified,
Grabbed onto, made representative, minded,
Even as I soak in source, mind surrounded by source,
Source in my mind and all around it water
Flowing like thoughts along my moving hair
Downwards, downwards, downwards ideas
Swishing southwestward wishing for the sea.

The sole spot the soul of the southwest stays still,
The whole river here, still, as in persisting, not motionless.

But how can I believe in the great dream of the sea
When I know the Colorado can no longer reach?
Oh Whitman, I envy your positive ease,
The possibilities of your democratic vistas still so open,
And now so many closed, so much New World blown,
Unchosen by me and my generation too late,
Already the battle mostly lost, life’s diversity dead or dying,
What you feared, Walt, democratic vistas burned over,
Scars as far as I can see, gray mountains and valleys,
American materials proving stronger than American ideals
Decisively, destructively, unstoppable, for keeps.

Too late, Hohokam, the West dried up
Before we could ever vote for our lives.
They must have known without realizing
They were counting down to something—
Generation Z.

How can our poetry be more than mourning?

Damn the Glen Canyon Dam! Damn Lake Powell!
Damn the arrogance to name an atrocity
For a dead man who knew better,
Knew water was the natural shape of the west,
Knew there should be one Colorado state from peak to sea,
Knew it because he had flowed its length with one arm,
Knew states competing for water meant water is lost,
Knew Americans’ penchant to use too much—
Is the vice of Vegas worth the death of the West?
Is the diversion through desert deserved
For a Phoenix which cannot renew itself?

Before man’s hubris and delusions of control
The Grand River ran from the Rockies to the sea,
The thrust of the continent’s release and surcease,
The Western course once reached wild destiny.

Now the dream of the West evaporates from fake lakes,
Evaporates in the last stretch before the Gulf,
The Delta where the change is meant to make
The river what it wants to be— the whole— the sea,
The last leap to the peace that was promised.

A month ago the Colorado was my oasis by Blythe,
A cool respite from hitchhiking across the June desert—
I swam in an oxbow off the still-running river
And could have convinced myself it would make it,
But I can’t help but know better.

For the second year in a row my life has followed the Colorado,
The desert my winter home, the mountains my summer home,
Following the failed course in reverse in search of source,
To learn how to redeem the dream of the West
Now lost in a land of waste.