The Photojournalism Archive

With Monument Valley as a backdrop on the Navajo Nation, members of the Monument Valley High football team practice on their field at the Arizona-Utah border.

Cosmological Games

Not a line in the sand, not a Maginot Line

     Or thirty-eighth parallel, not the line

between good and evil, salvation and damnation,

     but a limed line in the gamed grass.

Eroding quartz and lizards, creosote roots

     and desperate thirst, underscore

and underneath this squared, green-sodded desert.

     There it be lined up, ruled, measured:

 drives, goals, penalties. Uniformed bodies fired

     against bodies, the colliding energy

of Friday night stars. No solitary Big Bang,

     but the ruled universe

of chaos, simply one random number

     waged against another on the down field

scoreboard. The long game played

     in fragrance heat, the narcoleptic sagebrush

subsumes memory and remembering.

     Nothing else happening Friday evenings,

But the applause of buttes, cheers of mesas,

     deafening beyond belief.