Our honeymoon was a strand              of scenic overlooks. I first wrote                            strange—a strange of scenicoverlooks—my mistake, and strange              enough was the desert penned                            in red ink. The scenewas either Sedona or Mars. They say              the iron in the rocks calls                            to the iron in our blood,so it tugs on us. It tugged. We stayed              on Airport Mesa, where we called                            the crowds drawn to sanguinesunsets “tourists,” as if we weren’t,              and where, each night, the Milky Way                            made a mess of the sky.Was I the only one who wanted              to wipe its white smudge away,                            to polish the nightblack again? Our honeymoon              was a stranded scene I overlooked.                            We posed for photographswe never took. I remember the moon              framed above the landscape, looking                            silvery as a tintypetaken in a modern-day ghost town.              The last day, we reached the canyon                            and saw where the riverhad over millions of years chewed it down              to bone, clear to the canyon’s                            strange marrow, riveninto red, copper, and purple—bands              like sunsets compressed and recorded                            in rock. That viewremains. Our honeymoon was a strand,              a strangeness, a look ahead. I wrote                            only what I could see.