Poems

For Bill, in his kayak

Teasing the current, dancing in spray
a river otter man-child
is at play
   in the dawn,

and the cool canyon walls at sunrise
are echoing laughter, and the light
from his laughing blue eyes
   paints the Utah sky
      in the color of day.

Mine was a heart so sandwashed and windblown
it lay still and cold
as Desolation sandstone
   on a moonless night,

when in a calm eddy of water,
with a slap of his tail and an Eskimo roll,
an imp, a pixie, a blue-eyed man-otter

gives me a smile that rises the sun.

Suzanne Motsinger Berman, 1992

   When I went to bed that night I lay there quite a while thinking about the trip that was fast drawing to a close. As I looked up at the stars I realized that nothing had given me more pleasure than sleeping, with the canyon walls the headboard and the footboard of my bed and my covering the star-spangled blue sky above me. The utterly inexpressible peacefulness of those few moments before sleep came to a tired body and a mind at ease, were among the choicest of them all. The ease with which a person slips back into such a life, accents the artificiality of that which we consider normal existence. The sun and moon govern our hours. We went to bed by the sun and got up by the sun. Frequently during the night, the moon, as it came suddenly over the Canyon's rim, would flood our camp site with such light that we would awaken thinking day had come. Usually the beauty of the moonlight on the Canyon walls, on the temples and the peaks above, was so soul-stirring that we would fight sleep until we had our fill of it or until sleep won the battle. The elements were the most important factors in our lives—the wind that blew the sand and caused discomfort, or that blew up stream and made it necessary for us to row through the quiet stretches. The sun that beat so mercilessly upon our naked, tanned bodies—the heat that caused us to drop in and out of the water as effortlessly as beavers and to lie on the deck while the evaporating water cooled our bodies. The storms that we would watch above us, wondering whether they belonged to us or to those who lived on the rim in another world. Many times we could see it raining high up on the Canyon wall with no rain falling where we were. Sometimes a cloud would pass over high above and from it just a few hard-hitting heavy drops would fall. At other times the storm would really be ours, lightning flashed, thunder rolled back and forth echoing everlastingly, and we would huddle under a cliff or try to make ourselves as small as possible in the boat, for the rain was cold and chilling against our super-heated bodies. The elements were the important factors and, above all, the water—always the water—that filled our thoughts all day long and whose roar sang us to sleep and greeted us as we awakened at sunrise. Always the water, the water we had eagerly greeted at the beginning, on which for miles we had lazily drifted, in which we had swum and played, with which we had fought and battled and which had given us adventure, thrills, experiences and memories that would be ours for ever. Always the elements, and only the elements.

from By the Rim of Time