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I started the blog with a poem, so it seems fitting to end it with one of the poems written on the trip:

Of Rivers and Volcanos

Purgatoire, Colorado, Virgin, American,
the rivers of our travels slice through the earth
revealing the stony sweep of time,
layers of compression, erosion, uplift, and stretch,
a landscape of anger,
grieving, forgiveness, love.

The rocky tale traces inland seas,
echoes tectonic plates colliding or drifting apart
in basalt, pumice, schist, granite,
sandstone, limestone, shale.

I want to leave no stone unturned
on the trail of my own geology, in flux,
changing daily as we hike down canyon, up cinder cone,
over slippery stones in a cool river, whose shady ledges
are fringed with wildflowers.

Two of us, often seeking the fault line, making mountains
out of molehills, travel literally and figuratively through
basin and range, over vent and fumarole.
In relationship we have our joint geography,
high-water rages, the snowmelt of old tears.

Our story of stone is told in the cool mystery
of Sedona canyons, the fragile liveliness
of desert crust, the hopeful sweep of sandstone arches, the sharp
and knotted lava flows of Craters of the Moon.
We become whatever landscape we choose to make.

©2008 Amelia L. Williams

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