The canyon losing definition as the sun breaks toward the Uinkarets.  Declivities dissolve into dusky and soft shapes.  Cavities fill, first with light, and then swell with darkness.  Bereft of the contours chiseled in youth, flies buzz on the carcasses of stone, backlit by flakes of ash from the long dead volcanoes spread in chains up from the river farther west, from Vulcan’s Throne to Trumbull.  All the chasms filled in by dusty light, soft and windswept and golden.  The cliffs, serrated teeth, meshed gears on either side of the wending Inner Gorges, are defiles no more as the ember light descends on them, oblique, gentle, yet smothering, all-consuming.  Pulling shape and identity from the stone until the Canyon burns beyond recognition.  Glorified yet swept clean of contour by the soft, blinding embrace.  Blue shifts to cobalt, heated in a crucible to the meltpoint of liquid gold.

Given time, all things, even majesty, serene in death.  Struggle transmutes into relinquishment, a gentle yielding of daylight, from stirring to stillness.  All the action played out, the taking of the life from the day a willing passage of seasons.  In the union of day and night, dusk, the bardo of dark rust, bestows beauty, grants peace.

© 2015 by Michael C. Just