A Place to Stand

•

It's not easy to reach the highest places
where roads end—Steens Mountain, Hat Point, Eagle Cap
beyond any road—but from here we can see
a long way, find the perspective of distance,

map the country spreading beneath us, this land
we have learned to call home. One man who had walked
on the moon still yearned to step out into sky,
that glass floor above the Grand Canyon, balance

all he had seen above and below. Vision
can blind us, though, even wrap a warm blanket
around history: driving past Celilo,
we don't look. None of this happened by chance.

High on the bluff, River People
stand watch, wait for dam walls to collapse, the Falls
to emerge and the salmon to shiver home,
free. What they see is the shape of silence.