“Elkhorn,” “Badlands,” and “Grand Canyon”

It looks near the peak like wind has rubbed alpine grass

from the clean-edged boulders like paint from the head

of a statue of a child. You take a photo of Hank and me

in which we are invisible against a mountain of ankle-

breaking gaps. Carefully, we climb. Between the gaps jut

moments, edges for balance—we perch and look back

across the saddle toward Crow. At the peak, a piled

rock ring to thwart the wind where we hunker for jerky

and fruit snacks. Then we stand and wander out across

this high short plain in different directions in silence,

Hank navigating back and forth between us. He pants

and looks with me across haze to Helena, with you toward

the start of the Missouri. We come back together then,

descend from stone to grass to woods to the sunny town.

We park to scan the alien flats on the approach to the whipped out ground

Beach pails spilling rocks we’ll never reinspect onto the floor of the backseat

Down at eye level with an ancient red layer of the Earth Evan takes the skin

Off his shins trying to sneaker ski a curved water-carved rim of gravel

After you tell him to stop or he’ll hurt himself we scamper three prairie dogs

Between the stair steps of pliable stone and chirp warnings of hawks

It’s a bluebird day a sweat yourself parched without realizing day

But the belly of the backpack and its shoulders hold tepid water

And sunburned under the yellow letters we pass the saddled jackrabbit

Graze the feathers of dreamcatchers and faux flutes at Wall Drug

So when the T-Rex starts up roaring from behind its flimsy gate

You both drag me nearer to laugh to cancel the old old fear of old beasts

We get back in the car, quiet.

I wonder if theirs is the quiet

of awe, as mine should be

since we’ve just finally seen it.

The rend in the desert, sudden

cut from under the feet, orange

to my eyes less-than-grand

canyon. Later, eating burgers

after we’ve scrubbed her fine

dirt from our shins, after

winding down the stacked

layers of her threshold

to the first resthouse past

necklaces of mules where I

slipped on the silt pounded

to silk by their hooves and

cracked my pink camera

on a rock to somehow watch

its dusty lens extend again,

then slogged back up her walls

in the highest heat of day

setting switchback goals

for water and jokes on the state

of our backs beneath our packs—

only after all this does my father

set down his burger and pause

and say, It certainly

grew grander on me.