Chaco Canyon National Historical Park, October, 2016
By Bruce Parker
January 15, 2023
January 15, 2023
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On a warm day in the canyon,
the only gold the Spanish would ever see the cottonwoods along every river, a woman walked past low walls in the shadows of broken buildings, careful to stay on the Park Service paths that violated the orientation of everything made according to laws of sun and moon and she felt-- she told me this much later-- “tragedy and suffering,” cold despite the Autumn sun. She saw also the Park Service had killed the place with well-meant preservation, halted the return of stone to earth, the wind’s sanding down rock, the snowmelt’s undermining, so that the suffering she felt remained, nowhere to go, no way to return to the mountains aligned always with the sun and moon. Lost, she returned to the car and said nothing of the suffering she felt. |
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Bruce Parker is the author of the chapbook Ramadan in Summer, (Finishing Line Press, 2022). He holds an MA in Secondary Education from the University of New Mexico. His work appears in Triggerfish Critical Review, The Field Guide, Blue Unicorn, Cerasus, (UK) and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and is an Associate Editor at Boulevard.
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