The Canyon
Beyond the strip of backyard
grass, further than the rim
of ice plant’s succulent green spears, past
the firebreak bulldozers shaved
each spring across tufts of scrubby
chaparral and mustard, exposing once
a mole nest—pink, hairless pups mewling
for a mother long gone—the canyon
stretched to the Pacific, that blue band at the edge
of her childhood. She blazed trails past the creek bed
where a sister mined a vein of clay, shaping
finger pots later sun-fired on the back porch.
Adventure took her to the old war, sometimes further,
before statehood, but seldom out of earshot.
Downstream, as the canyon deepened, she climbed
past cactus, missing it and circling back,
to the flank of white quartz
bared on the hillside. She called it
The Horse Bone, visited it as pilgrim,
stroking its cool mineral side, thanking it for imagined
fidelity as true as any fact. From there,
on a clear day, she saw the Channel Islands.
Sometimes gray frigates blocked
the horizon, LSTs chugging soldiers to shore for war
games. Just as often coastal fog
crept in with the tide, making her glad
for the handbell her mother rang for supper, or her father’s
whistle that drilled through the mist. She ran home
by feel, sneakered feet surprised to find
the firebreak’s red dirt suddenly there,
solid and safe, a parent waiting to inspect
that day’s treasure spilled
from pockets: smooth pebbles, a feather,
shells bleached with age.
photo from the Nebraska MFA in Writing website
Candace Black’s poems and essays have appeared in Chariton Review, Harpur Palette, Iron Horse Literary Review, Milkweed Chronicle, Quarterly West, and The Seattle Review, among others. Her debut book of poems The Volunteer (New Rivers Press) won the Minnesota Voice Poetry Prize. Black is the recipient of a Loft Literary Center Creative Nonfiction Residency, a SASE/Jerome Foundation Fellowship, McKnight Individual Fellowship and a Loft-McKnight Award in Poetry.
