This series of paintings accompanies a poem called “Zion,” which is part of the larger poem-cycle “Petroglyph Americana”. This work explores “Zion” as a place-name and physical landscape in the American southwest, and also as a holy city or heaven. It is about the relationship between natural landscapes and spiritual or religious values, and the human communities where these two intersect.
An excerpt from “Zion”:
sun rays,
red-orange windmill blades
radiate the silver dusk.
east hiway 9 out of Zion,
pull to the shoulder of a curve
and walk down a gravel bank,
cross through a culvert
into a shadowed gorge.
thick firs grow along a sandy wash,
ice clings like plastic skin
to leaves and twigs
along the edges of the stream.
grotto caves pock a limestone cliff,
rows of eyes and mouths eroded in the face of stone.
in a sheltered overhang
like the hollow of a throat,
American petroglyphs
incised by
stone tools into stone—
