We have just arrived.
We are standing on the south rim
looking down, feeling our bodies slip
and fall away from us past the cliff face
into that deep space below. We feel light
and small now, our equilibrium shaken, as we watch
the raven riding thermals, its sleek black feathers
shining in the sun as it glides just above the rim
then drops down again. Out across the chasm
Shiva's Temple rises above a moat
of mist and seems to float. Someone aims
a camera, someone puts his hand in his pocket
to hold onto his keys. We breathe in
green scents of pine, cedar, warm red sandstone.
Breaking the spell, cutting up the stillness
with its loud blades, a helicopter rises
out of the depths of the canyon —
we don't know whether to laugh or bow
to the burro rising before us in a sling.
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Greg Pape is the author of nine books, including Border Crossings, Black Branches, Storm Pattern (all originally published by University of Pittsburgh Press), Sunflower Facing the Sun (winner of the Edwin Ford Piper Prize – now called the Iowa Prize – and published by University of Iowa Press), American Flamingo (winner of a Crab Orchard Open Competition Award, and published by Southern Illinois University Press), and Four Swans (published by Lynx House Press).
His poems have been published widely in such magazines and literary reviews as The Atlantic, Iowa Review, The New Yorker, Northwest Review, and Poetry. He has received the Discovery / The Nation Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowships, the Pushcart Prize, the Richard Hugo Memorial Poetry Award, and his poems have been featured on NPR and read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. He teaches at the University of Montana, and in the Brief-Residency MFA program at Spalding University. He served as Poet Laureate of Montana from 2007 to 2009.
"Moment: Grand Canyon" was published in his 2011 collection Animal Time.