Driving for the Grand Canyon just before dusk we pass a police officer on the side of the road, his lights going a thousand beats per minute. He’s even got the guy, or girl — we’re driving too fast to tell — out of the car for a lecture.
Looking at the darkening sky
I continue to speed past
thinking he’s caught his limit.
A half an hour later he catches up to us
but I’ve spotted him in the rear view a ways back
and am only doing sixty-five —
he pulls us over anyway.
As he approaches the driver’s side window he taps the face of the stopwatch on his wrist says he punched it when we passed him forty miles back and has calculated our average speed — distance over time — to be around eighty. He writes the ticket and chuckles to himself when we tell him we’re trying to see the Grand Canyon before dark. It’s another forty, forty-five minutes up the road, he says.
In the morning we walk to the metal railing
at the edge of the canyon
and look about one mile down
and another eighteen across.
It only takes my eyes a few seconds to do this
and I calculate my average speed at around
thirty thousand miles per hour.
Then I slow it down, looking to where the rings of rock change color,
where the faint black curl of a river cuts through, where a pebble kicked over the edge skips along and then disappears, and where a well-armored pill bug moves steadily along the cement platform then dips into the canyon itself and distance over time becomes Sisyphean.
In the afternoon we sit in the sun reading on lounge chairs. I look over at you, lost in your book of entangled lovers, such distance in your eyes, so far from here, so far that I can’t even see you.
Then you look up and smile. You’ve come back in an instant, you’ve traversed such infinite distance to be with me and moved at such astonishing speeds to find me here sitting with you in the sun.