I sit on the splintered bench where the trail drops close to the river’s edge, one boot untied, laces dark from morning grass.
The wood pricks through my jeans only when I swing my legs so I have to choose between comfort and carefree— the mosquito zigzagging around my wrist reminds me to slow down.
Below me, water folds over stone, slides around a half-sunken branch, catches for a second on something I cannot see, then keeps moving.
A world within a world within a world. Each with its own beginning, middle, and end.
I rest my elbows on my knees and watch cottonwood seeds land on the surface, play Russian roulette with the current and sometimes lose.
But sometimes they win.
There used to be an island here but now only swimming for fish and food for one crane whose beak was made for moments like this.
Across the bank, a sycamore leans like a dancer— if I tried that move I might hurt myself. But the sycamore— graceful, roots half exposed, holding a wall of mud through another season of rain.
What happens here at night? Does the dancer feel lonely?
I run my thumb along the groove someone carved into the bench years before I found it. There used to be a heart scribbled here. Was it time or circumstance that rubbed it away?
Where do all the lovers go who leave their hearts on benches in trees and in one another's hands?
The river keeps carrying branches, leaves, foam, the occasional flash of silver,
and twenty feet downstream a man in a fishing boat has a pole for an arm, a hat for eyes, and a dream I cannot see—
I stay on the splintered bench swinging my legs watching the sunlight
feeling the shade.
—Iris Lennox literary pen name of Jill Szoo Wilson
You might as well befriend the moon— embrace her clouded peekaboos. And music…
Receive the tune— no time to choose— alone in a crowd or no one in view. And a smell…
Wafts past your nose— what was that? Or who?
Perfume on skin or a place that you knew.
Pause.
No need to wonder— you know who that was— and who you are as nostalgia winds the second hand round.
“Time is a straight line,” said he. “It moves consecutively, watches as it goes behind and below, like walking a path that winds into— well— no one knows.”
“No one knows, that’s right,” said she. “Simply put, I do agree. But there’s no line to speak of. Time bends—not like a knee— more like a finger touching its thumb or a rainbow finding its spherical end and answering with a gentle, Come.”
Time returns to the places we’ve been.
One says, “That memory is far.” Another, “The moment is here.”
Yesterday can be set down, but the nows of that day rise from the ground without notice or sound—
to delight or confound— it depends on the seconds into which they were bound.
Moments become recollections. Recollections, seeds with a life of their own.
Promises and hope, gentleness and rage, a touch, a glance, a well-appointed room or a half-written page—
all sown into skin, finding rest in smiles and tears, repose and toil, love and loss, freedom and cost, and the way sunlight lay across the earth at the end or when it all began.
“That was back then,” said he. “That is today,” said she.
The minutes listened.
“There is wisdom in both.”
Time smiled— crouched, quiet— behind an autumn tree, waiting for the final leaf to fall.
It begins with a question as most things do— standing still and not understanding and then, why? Sometimes, how?
Before me— bands of color arranged with conviction, clearly the earth has already decided what each layer means and is in no hurry to explain itself.
The greatest beauty rarely does.
Someone wearing a mud-stained hat and pants that swoosh when he walks has named them. Kaibab Limestone at the rim. Toroweap beneath it. Coconino Sandstone—once dunes, moved grain by grain under a wind that no longer blows.
This was a desert, then a sea, then something in between that does not translate cleanly into a single word.
Mystery mingling with majesty.
I look at the red— Hermit Shale, perhaps— soft once, willing to be shaped, now holding its position like a memory that has settled into fact.
Further down, older still, Vishnu Schist— stone that endured heat, pressure, nothing erased, everything contained and displayed— a record I cannot read, written in a language I have not learned. But I recognize this:
Resilience.
Two billion years, give or take. The number means nothing to me other than "Wow."
The mind attempts a comparison— a human life, a century, a civilization rising and falling somewhere between two lines of rock.
It does not help.
Below it all, the river— still working. Still carrying what it has loosened. Still, rippling with stories that continue.
The Colorado meanders. It does not rush for anyone's benefit, the way an old man has learned to slow down. It cuts because that is what water does when given time and a way through.
I find myself asking questions that have no immediate use.
Who first noticed that this was once sand? Who looked closely enough to see ripple marks held in stone?
Who intuited that knowing this made the view larger and more intimate at the same time?
The tree beside me leans into its own inquiry, roots set in an answer that does not require words.
Its needles move in present tense.
No concern for uplift, erosion, continental drift— that long, slow negotiation between plates.
As for me—
I want to know how something becomes— how pressure instructs what to keep and what to release.
How absence— of water, of time, of witness— enters the record.
Curiosity does not simplify. It accumulates.
Another name. Another era. Another process quietly at work beneath the visible.
And suddenly the canyon is no longer wide.
It is specific.
I stand at the edge with a growing suspicion—
that beauty increases with knowledge,
and that time, unmeasured and indifferent, is not empty distance but the most patient artist I have ever encountered.
Iris Lennox 