~

His life these days is like walking a trail,

maybe that wash* in Arizona when 

he was on retreat, when on one side of 

him were the Stations of the Cross and on

the other side the picture rocks that give 

the wash its name: 1500-year-old 

petroglyphs by the Hohokam farming

people of the Sonoran Desert.

~

On one side, 14 etchings in metal

depict Jesus’s progression to his

death: scourging and the crown of thorns, falling 

under the cross’s weight, piercing, thirst, and 

humiliation, abandonment by 

friends, followers, even God, death. And 

he thinks of the violence and cruelty

of the empire in which he lives against

the materially poor and the sick

and the marginalized, his feeling that 

God has abandoned the country he loves,

his own pains in places he never knew

he had; indignities; lashings of fear; 

the cross he carries of his family’s

disease; the piercing loss of his daughter.

On the other side, petroglyphs show the 

the sun’s progression during the summer 

solstice: swirls and spirals and strange designs, 

images of dancing people, deer and 

antelope, alien-looking creatures

(you don’t suppose…), and something that looks like 

a picture of an atom, but which might

depict life’s interconnected circle.

He thinks of the kind and kinds of people 

he’s met in traveling from coast to coast,

this country’s mountains, deserts, and rivers, 

of the smell of the dirt in his garden,

dancing with his wife, watching grandchildren

grow up, his church men’s group, his circle of 

friends, his joy in writing a good poem.

He recalls walking between the two sides

of the wash, hearing what might have been a 

cacophony or what might have been a 

choir of quails, doves, finches, cactus wrens, 

flickers, thrashers, cardinals, fly catchers, 

pyrrhuloxia, verdins…and he hears

the sounds of his life: voices of parents 

who, despite their own horrible childhoods, 

made of themselves a living sacrifice

for their children, echoes of the friends he’s 

lost, and of the friends he still has, some of 

them going back to childhood, the teachers 

he disappointed and the teachers who

were there when he needed them, the students 

he failed, and those he inspired, the sounds 

of the tortured last breaths of his daughter, 

and the glorious voice of the woman 

he loves as she reads the Sunday Gospel. 

~

He remembers the Arizona sky

which canopied both sides of the wash,

feeling the paradox that is his life 

enfolded by Something—The Holy Spirit, 

The Tao, The Great Spirit, Jesus, Buddha,

Jehovah, Allah, Brahmin, The God of 

My Not Understanding—he doesn’t care

about names, he’s grateful to be here and

eager to see what’s around that next bend.

~~

*a wash is a dry, low, sandy riverbed that only carries water during rare rain events. It’s often called an arroyo.