Despite the Sun

Driving home
from Dad’s funeral,
we pass Arimo –
a gas station
and six houses
in the middle of a valley.
September scoured
the pastures white
and left the cows
just black spots
on a solar field.
A million years ago,
this valley held
a long, wide arm
of Lake Bonneville,
ten miles across,
a mile deep, and blue
like evening shadows.
Arimo sits in what was
the deepest part of the river,
the darkest floor
of a vanished sea.
Harvested wheat fields
stretch in bands
between leopard skin
rows of cheatgrass,
juniper, sage, and stone.
The late afternoon sun
illuminates everything,
turns dust plumes
into diamond curtains
drawn across the valley.
Not for us though.
Not today.
My father pulled
a million years
and all the sun
under with him
this afternoon
and we, despite
the sun, drive through
the deepest part
of the river.