This new work I'm doing now in collaboration with Stephen
Strong are poems and prose about the Canyon de Chelly
up in northeastern Arizona.
This canyon is still home to many of the Diné people.
They still live in the canyon.
They grow crops.
They have their animals there.
They hold ceremonies there.
It's also a big tourist destination.
So you can hire a guide to drive you into the canyon.
And you can see all the sites down there
and go to Spider Rock.
You can go to North rim or the South Rim.
And you spend days in that canyon looking
at all the beauty there.
So much beauty there and not enough
film to take all those photographs.
So people come from all over the world to visit this canyon.
There's a little community right outside of Canyon de Chelly.
It's called the Chinle.
And there's a little restaurant called The Junction Cafe.
And walking there in the summer, you
can hear all these different languages--
German, Swiss, so you can hear French, Japanese, and English.
And they're on going on this little restaurant.
I was asked if I was interested in writing this manuscript.
And I immediately said yes, because, even though I didn't
grow up near that canyon, I've always
felt this strong magnetism to be there and even to just stand up
at the rim and look down into it.
I lived in the Midwest for a number of years.
And that was always one of the places
I wanted to go visit when I came home to visit my family.
So I was very happy to do this work.
And my collaborator, as I said, is Stephen Strom.
So we took a couple of trips into the canyon,
one in the summertime and then one in the fall.
Took our cameras, and just dove in there,
and stopped wherever we wanted for as long
as we wanted, and just took photographs.
And most of the photographs I think are done now,
and Steve will talk about that a little bit later.
And I spoke to some of the guides
that we took us in there.
One woman, in particular, knew a lot of stories about that area.
And so she would tell the Navajo.
So some of the things that I heard
up here in this manuscript that I've written, most of the work
is done.
And I'm not sure what the name of it is,
but it's probably something like "Say It Deep Within the Rock."
Our word for the Canyon de Chelly is Tséyi', which means
deep in the rock.
It wasn't until later an outsider
named it Canyon de Chelly.
So this is some recent work from that.
"The round belly of the Earth, Western culture bill squares
and rectangles.
They lie in patterns across the humid green of the Midwest
that the jet I am taking flies over.
The German, Swedes, Danes, and Eastern Europeans
that flooded this country brought with them the theory
to tame the land, first, by the force of themselves,
opening the Earth and dropping seeds into her.
They realized the abundance of the Earth and wanted more.
Getting into the mountain states,
the shapes turn into green circles
that spin on the surface of the Earth.
From the sky, one wonders at the perfect roundness of them,
because from the ground, the shapes are evident.
Like the geometric shapes of the Midwest,
the circles mean the land has been
worked for what it can give.
In the Southwest, the terrain changes again.
Now light colored fissures run like roots on the dry mesas
extending outward.
Roads and highways wind around the canyons and dry riverbeds.
The Rio Grande River flows southward.
And on both sides, towns have sprung up alongside it.
The contrast here is how the land yields only to itself,
defying the manipulations of Western men and his machines.
The Indigenous peoples came to this knowledge thousands
of years ago.
They took only what the Earth would give them.
In doing so, they showed their gratitude by offering prayers
so that the Earth would continue to sustain our fragile lives.
They made their homes and ceremonial centers
in a circle on the round belly of the Earth."