I flew through the Grand Canyon last year in a small plane.
I did not fly myself through.
This really requires a specialist
as a lot of the newspaper accounts
of the accidents that I'm sure you've been reading
will suggest to you.
And I ended up writing a very lush transcendental rhapsodic
essay that went on forever and ever about it
and also a poem in what I think is pretty Spartan language.
I don't know why it sorted itself out that way.
But I thought I would read the poem to you.
"Grand Canyon."
"Geologic in their repose, memories lie,
carmeled by sunlight and captive as the river
far below the shale blossoms of canyon wall.
Each with cutting edge and sandy flux, each
the hem and panorama for the next,
laid out like so many bolts of light fabric.
One's ocean and lava, one's lightning and fossil.
How regular, how explicable, even dull
was the frenzy when ruts glistened and flooded,
pinnacles jutted up, continents gave way,
and tawny limbs of Earth crashed together and held.
Now the emptiness is larger than anything that defines it.
Larger than tantrums of shadow and heat,
larger than the other canyons whose sunlight
is image, whose rivers are misgiving,
in which donkeys also walk slender pathways to the floor
despite the froth of rapids, despite the ancient hurling
which set all in motion, despite the oily black reflections
of the birds whose open wings are lifted eyebrows,
despite the sunlight swarming across the valley
in immaculate crimson, unforgettable
in the stale glare of reflection."