Selected Works
Atlantic, Iowa
Bird Syntax
Bric-a-Brac
Dear Thano
New Hopes†
Doorbell Press
Contact
No Name
published in Diagram 13.7, Sept. 2025
The riverbanks pass by, are delivered to us: wildflowers, cliffsides; the endless water-train rushing through (“…the Green sweeps…”). “Just like walking the plank,” you remind me: “no need to rush,” swatting at flies as I set up the tent. The dog is sitting in the shade, enamored with the swallows that dart about the sandstone, caking their mud nests across the great, burning walls that rise up impossibly like oil-tankers or cruise ships (“…cliffs of rocks; tables of rock; plateaus of rock; terraces of rock…”) to encircle us in a small, green basin (“…a little park, just large enough for a farm…”). Being here is like being the picture in a locket. Inside the tent in our hot little park we hide like children, watching the bugs buzz against the screen as I tell you about my dream last night. “I was a gas-station souvenir and you bought me at the register,” I say, which you take to mean something about capitalism, and I take to mean I love you. “A Sinclair, maybe, or the Pump & Go—you clipped me to your keyring,” I go on, listening to your heavy breath circle the world and come back as a breeze, commanding short, rapturous openings through the doors where I can look out on the campground, trapped under the thick glass of high noon, as I talk us to sleep. “Or that other one with the good name—Loaf ‘N Jug.” I can see the museum of yellow butterflies pinned to our fender, the ribbons of drawings pinned to the cliffs: kneeling archer, bighorn sheep, ornamental drum (“…Wrote our names on Echo rocks…”). This morning we stopped at each little trail-head sign (“…Indian trail…”), mapping the petroglyphs high on the walls, and pitched camp right beneath them. Now they step inside on the breeze, blinking at us over and over, until the gentle rhythm of the world draws me, too, into the pleasure of sleep, and we become one great, slumbering, three-bodied animal. The tent is our lung, our eyelid, waiting for the sun to burn off the bugs like a fever (“…every eye wonders…”), when we will tromp through the brittle grass down to the river, leave our clothes folded on the bank, boots on top, and wade into the brown, cold water (“…under the box-elders, by the river side…”). As the sun lowers in the sky, the box-elders (“…clumps of box-elders…”) leech sepia-tone into the air like a tannin. “Tannins,” you say, “I think plural.” I watch you and the dog rush into the shallows, watch an airplane pass through the leaves (“…I with blanket spread…”), still thinking of gas stations. “Maverik Adventure’s First Stop”—which I think is supposed to read “Maverik, Adventure’s First Stop.” I dig my Coke a respite in the mud and wade in, skipping “Hello!”s to the other side like stones. On 18 June the men counted twelve returns (“…like telegraph poles on an outstretched plain…”); I muster 4, the dog 6—“good girl,” patting her head. They named this place “Echo Park” (“…your own voice…”) and the towering wall behind your head “Echo Rock”--the prettiest wall I have ever seen (“…the prettiest wall I have ever seen…”). Whatever is given it whispers back, like a sounding board in the pulpit where the murky Yampa and green Green River bend in a horseshoe around your waist. Your skin looks like soft sea-glass through the water, your fingers like the boaters coming now around the bend, waving in their orange vests and yellow helmets, as you wander up to the towel, and the dog coaxes me to her grass-slicked islet to fight against the current (“…the Green sweeps…”). Each time she climbs out, shakes off, jumps in, the boaters cheer, until just their voices come around the bend, hooting like bird calls. And there are bird calls too—yellows—that chirp just like the men did, calling out names like captions from their boats: “Flaming Gorge” (“…flaring, brilliant…”); “Beehive Point” (“...the old time form…”); “Echo Park”; “Red Canyon”; “Hell’s Half Mile”; “Kingfisher Creek,” “Kingfisher Canyon,” and “Kingfisher Park,” where the kingfishers played in the water (“…and so we adopt as names…”). They gave suggestions, argued choices. “Mille Crag Bend” (“…numbers of crags…”); “Canyon of Lodore” (“…un-American, to say the least…”). On 9 June the Major catches the bright star Vega sleeping on the hillside (“…a jewel…”) and consecrates “Cliff of the Harp” (“…so I name it…”)(“…we name it…”)(“…we have given the name…”)(“…I have named them…”)(“…we decide to name this…”)(“…is the name…”)(“…as we have named it…”). I can hear it piling up inside me, the scree of our actions, these names, like stones dropped from a great height, each knocking on the door of the last. I can hear them tumbling the decades (“…echoes come back…”)—water rushing, grass blowing; the Major dangling his feet over the edge like a child (“…come back…”)(“…now…”). There is no bottom for it except within ourselves. I would like to imagine that there has never been another moment, that I can be something else, but the sound will not stop. It cannot. On the other side men are knocking (“…come back…”)(“…it is the echo of your own voice…”). By the time the men made camp here, ten days later, all battered and wet (“…a sense of loneliness as he looks on the little party…”), names were their lone provision. Two nights earlier a gust had taken their campfire to the willows and sent them rushing to the boats in the dark—their spoons, plates, knives, and forks spilling to the rapids; clothes, blankets, bedrolls to be burnt; their ears singeing (“…ears scorched…”). They reached the glory of “Echo Park” (“…I gaze off…”) leaving No Name behind them. That boat was their heaviest (“…oak; stanch and firm…”), and they named its gravesite “Disaster Falls” (“…perfect hell of…”), where one man almost drowned (“…head above the water…”)(“…a cloud of spray above it…”), dragged, at the last minute, onto an islet they called “Disaster Island” (“…clinging…”). His name was Frank Goodman (“…our attention was now turned to Goodman…”)(“…a stranger to us…”), the last man to join the expedition. He had encountered the group in Green River City, (“…a stout, willing Englishman…”) just twenty-three years old, so eager to enlist he offered to pay his own way. Unlike the other men, his motivations were not scientific or pecuniary but personal (“…florid anticipations…”)(“…the name…”). Instead he rose each morning (“…men and fragments…”), stepped into No Name, and set about rowing (“…the distance through…”). As a shade begins to chill the air, the dog and I come to drip you a kiss and start down the slender cut-bank trail, written through the grass like a signature, but she remains at your side, a statue, and leaves me to walk on alone (“…All hands in today…”). When I look back from the green of a few tall cottonwoods (“…cottonwoods stand…”), the shadows have swallowed you. The diaries promise a canyon teeming with life (“…Buffalloe…”)(“…Mountain sheep…”)(“…fishing…”), but this evening “Echo Rock” crowns an atavism of grass, water, and dust like a billethead (“…the “testimony of the rocks”…”), casting its yellow soul into each crack and crevice (“…Echo Wall…”)(“…Echo Clift…”). On the second day at camp, the Major scaled the wall to the top—tans, beiges, reds—and looked down into the hot, slanted basin where his men lazed ant-like on the shore—like you, resting on the riverbank (“…under the box-elders, by the river side…”). Goodman had lost even his clothes in the wreck, and he wandered below with the others, fishing, cleaning, and carving their names into the rock (“…Wrote our names on Echo rocks…”). If Goodman carved his name that evening (“…so I name it…”)(“…is the name…”), it was the only place it took. Two weeks later, he quit (“…has seen enough danger…”)(“...fonder of bullwhacking than rowing, left us…”), walking across the Utah desert to pursue his own private, nameless freedoms. In Vernal he builds a ranch; marries once; again; has six children. He will appear sometimes in the Vernal Express (“…Goodman, who was here…”)(“...Young Cotswold rams for sale…”), where he begins to publish short articles on the Civil War and the local pioneers (“…men and fragments…”). In one he begins to mention the expedition (“…started down the River…”) but there turns back, stepping from its annals as he had forty years before, the only member whose name is not remembered to the land. After he leaves, the men christen themselves “Hawkins Butte” and “Hall Butte”; “Howlands Butte” and “Dunne Butte”; “Sumner Wash” and “Bradley Point”; “Lake Powell” and “Powell Plateau”; but no “Goodman”: butte, park, or bend (“…the “testimony of the rocks”…”). His name does not even appear among those “men who dared to dive into the Great Unknown” on Powell Monument. “Goodman” was last spent in the Major’s journal the morning he set out into the desert, 5 July 1869 (“…It will be remembered he was the crew on the “No Name,” when she was wrecked…”). I like to imagine this means it can end; you can leave. You can turn around and stop: the river can stop; the rocks can stop. You do not have to go on, echoing through the small, mid-air grammars of the past (“…your own voice…”), because the world already has a language (“…cottonwoods stand…”)(“…clumps of box elders…”): a language called the world (“…the green sweeps…”). I like to imagine Goodman as Adam in the Garden, holding it commensurate, gathering his things, and going. I like to imagine it means I can be something else. I like to imagine it means there can be silence (“…our words are repeated…”)(“…like telegraph poles on an outstretched plain…”)(“…oak; stanch and firm…”)(“…a perfect hell of…”)(“…your own voice…”)(“…rises and falls…”)(“…seems to float away, and be lost, and then reappear…”)(“…broken, craggy, and sloping…”)(“…like a crosscut saw…”)(“…our thoughts wander back…”)(“…war clubs, beset with spines…”)(“…and nowhere can we find shelter…”)(“…head above the water…”)(“…a cloud of spray above it…”)(“…it is the echo of your own voice…”)(“…coming down the river this afternoon…”)(“…coming opposite…”)(“…Coming nearer…”)(“…these repeated echoes…”)(“…coming in from the west…”)(“…they have crumbled, and left holes in the wall…”)(“…as we have named it…”)(“…we have given the name…”)(“…oak; stanch and firm…”)(“…struggling…”)(“…to make headway against this current…”)(“…a perfect hell of…”)(“…your own voice…”)(“…And now the boys set up a shout, and I join them…”). Dancing sunlight makes a dancing sunburn, and when I wander back up the trail, there you are, dappled in sleep on the bank like some righteous, unnamed thing. You told me once the best way to knock a wall down was “just to hang a painting on it,” and you were right. It is a shame to say anything but the sun is setting. “We have macaroni to boil,” I say (“…All hands in today…”)(“…seven o’clock…”), and together we march in a daze through the chirring trees and brush back to our small tent in the park (“…a little park, just large enough for a farm…”).
*Excerpts in parentheses drawn from the Colorado River journals of John Wesley Powell, George Bradley, and John Colton Sumner.