CANYON by Noel Crook

Chapbook edition limited to 300 copies.
24 pages
5 1/4" x 9 1/2"
Text offset printed using Albertan Pro digital type.
Cover letterpress printed on Arches Cover.

Cover image: linoleum block cut by Barbara Whitehead.

The Sunday Swim, Comanche Bluff, 1975

The canyon ledge was steep and stark,
the pool below a patch of dark.

The canyon wrens careened our names
and from the narrow overhangs

the lupines leaned and clung, like us,
to any purchase they could muster.

We grappled down the frowning rock
then bolted for the swimming dock,

slowed to strip down to our skin,
the bullfrogs plopped to beat us in.

Other children, dark and bare,
had bathed and played and squatted there

and left us shining arrowheads
along the rocky water's edge.

The velvet slime squeezed through our toes
the water greened our feet and rose

around our hips and pulled us in,
filled our arms and cupped our chins.

Its coolness seeped into an ear.
The minnows threaded though our hair.

We floated there along with clouds,
clouds our ceiling, clouds our ground.

Two canyons soared to make our hall,
our voices rang the limestone walls.

from Canyon by Noel Crook