Charyn, Looking Down

Charyn from the rim is a red argument the river has been winning for twelve million years. Towers, ribs, alcoves, all of it layered like a sliced archive, all of it indifferent to the small woman standing at the edge holding a water bottle like a talisman. I stayed up top this time. The valley floor is for groups with picnic plans; the rim is for people who want the whole sentence at once.

There is a vertigo you get at edges like this that I have stopped trying to cure, because it is information. It tells you the scale is real, that the map was an abstraction and this is the referent. I walked the rim for an hour and took four photographs, which for me is monastic restraint.

Steppe wind all the way home to the guesthouse, horses somewhere, a storm assembling in the south with visible ambition. Tomorrow it can have me. Today the canyon had me.