National Park Service straining to process another long weekend,
The end of summer holidays. The visitors were already draining
Back out of the park by sunset, Monday, with the bulk of the locals
Or relatively locals, the plump families with school-age children, mostly gone.
The trails still rather bustled with people from overseas, fit young adults
And wan silver-haired elders, European and East Asian, by and large.
Well, what of it? The rocks looked like the rocks. The weather was typical,
Sunny and robin's-egg blue and pretty hot, but no longer brutal.
I took the truck for a pointless drive through the crowds across to the east side,
Where the trailheads boast a small parking lot and a picnic table
And a variety of familial memories for me. A landscape, a vivid,
Corrugated landscape that's easy to recognize, hard to forget,
Seems to demand some kind of response, to suggest that here is a place
That is firm enough for you to rappel your way back down by,
Although there is a long tunnel drilled right through the heart of it,
And every time it rains hard or snows then thaws they have to close
The roads to clear away the latest fallen rubble, and the shapes
That we most love to photograph with our flitting selves posed against them
Are all cracking and falling erratically as we snake in exhausting, constant lines
Through the middle of them, millions of us, shouting and documenting
How we travelled to show that we have seen such giant, magnificent fractures
In person, us, the ones you know from other contexts, see, we were there.
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