Along Short Creek, 1866
With each rising and setting sun,
Isabelle watches this weird red land catch fire,
but because bereavement and grief
have rubbed her heart raw, she perceives
the passing world around her wagon—
the wind-carved rocks and scrubby trees—
as vague shapes and interruptions.
And now that it’s evening, she waits,
listening for the next world to awake,
not because night sounds comfort her,
but because she needs to know when to hold
her hands tight against her ears and pray
the coyotes and catamounts and vermin
with tiny claws and teeth stay far away.
For she has not slept since Robert, her husband,
buried their baby in Kanarraville, a betrayal
that troubles her barely literate mind
and casts arching shadows over everything
she once knew about God’s kingdom
and its mysteries. For why would God
take such pains to fashion a life
after His own existence
only to snatch it away like a coin
in a magician’s trick? Isabelle’s own mother
bore twelve children in a wilderness
of diphtheria and death, and not one has passed.
So Isabelle has to ask: if God chooses
who lives and dies, what does that say
about Him and those who call him Father?
Tomorrow, she and Robert will die violently
on a red knoll that bears their name today
like a curse. But Isabelle does not know that yet,
not as she lies here, confused and afraid,
angry as the devilish glow of campfire on her face.
She wants to run from the future, not because
of what will happen, but because of what could.
She knows God, the Great Mystery, sees all,
watches this combustible landscape
and everything beyond it, not as gnarled shapes
or flickering shadows, but as adolescent forms,
gods in concept, sprouting into things
both terrible and sublime. And this heavy truth
presses Isabelle deep into the stony earth.
She feels it sharp against her wretched skin,
but she is too tired and stricken to scream.
— & —
Scott Hales is a writer and sometimes artist living in Eagle Mountain, Utah. His book Hemingway in Paradise and Other Mormon Poems was published in 2022.
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