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Grand Canyon

Maxine Kumin

Past the signs that say Stop! Go Back! 
We Are Friendly Indians! past the tables 
of garnet and red rock, of turquoise and silver, 
past horses thin as paper, profiled 
against a treeless horizon, I come 
to where all roads converge, I stand 
at each of a dozen jumping-off places 
with my fellow cripples, my fellow Americans 
peering into our national abyss. 

Outings for wheelchair postulants 
are regular affairs here on the brink 
of this improbable upheaved landscape; 
the clinic for chronic pain my therapists 
back East referred me to is, 
by Western measurements, just down the road. 
The group is quiet. Wind music lobs 
endless songs to would-be suicides 
from the river bottom’s Loreleis, 
a redemptive eight-hour hike below us, 
but no one’s leapt this week. Some travel 
both ways on the bony backs of mules, 
slaves forever on this tortuous trail. 

Despite the crowds, despite the kitsch, 
this mesa, this elevated plain 
has always been on my life list. 
Life-list, a compound noun in my 
directory. The fact is, I’m alive. 
The fact is, no conjecture can resolve 
why I survived this broken neck 
known in the trade as the hangman’s fracture, 
this punctured lung, eleven broken ribs, 
a bruised liver, and more. Enslaved 

three months in axial traction, in what they call 
a halo, though stooped, I’m up. I’m vertical. 
How to define chronic pain? 
Maddening, unremitting, 
raying out from my spinal cord 
like the arms of an octopus, squeezing, 
insidious as the tropic anaconda. . . . 
The experts are fond of saying 
spinal cord injuries are like 
snowflakes; no two are ever the same 
but while you’re lying on the table, unfrocked 
—no one tells you this—the twists and pummels, 
the stretches and presses are identical. 
One size of therapy fits all. 

Who practices for disaster? Who 
anticipates that the prized horse will bolt, 
that you will die/should have/didn’t? 
That a year will pass before 
you can walk the line they ask a drunk to, 
or balance on one foot. Who knew 
the dumb left hand could be retrained 
to cut meat, brush teeth, and yet the day I signed 
my name in loose spaghetti loops beneath 
the intended line, I wept. We joked 
I’d buy a stamp pad, roll my thumb, 
some day receive outrageous sums 
from Sotheby’s for my auctioned print, 
brave banter we all but choked 
on, but better than the cant that says, 
be grateful you’re alive, thank God. 
Implicit in it, you’ve had it too good. 

What would the friendly Indians trade 
to break loose from the white man who 
reduced them to servitude? 
What would the suicidal barter for 
deliverance from the Sisyphean boulder 
they daily roll uphill? 
What would I trade to regain 
my life the way it was? 
From pillar to abyss 
the answer echoes still: 
The word is everything.