John Macker
Summer Hiking Black Canyon 8,800 ft
⸺ for Gary Brower
El Nino improvises. Places its flaming eye to the ground, the load-bearing heat with pitiless unheard of clarity renews its summer subscription, colors of the Apache Plume blooming blow the mind into borderline smithereens lodge pole pine branches creak like haunted hinges. The words ricochet senselessly off of the canyon shadow. Another one of my friends now rides the zephyrs for an eternity of mornings. How many sacraments in a line of verse? I wonder. How many warm Sundays, plundered by loss, cheat death? According to the poets, Orpheus walked to the black river and never returned. Imbedded in every hike is a poem, a locus, an assemblage of rhythms and destinations, between them a weaving of bone-colored clouds. The canyon’s magic is the amity between stones, in the penstemons romancing their air.
remembering you a bewitched palaver songbirds rising into the sky
About the Author
John Macker has lived in Northern New Mexico for 28 years. He’s authored several books of prose and poetry including Atlas of Wolves and Desert Threnody, a 2021 winner of a New Mexico/Arizona Book Award.