THE NAMELESS
By Mario Chard
Photography: Jay Dash, VisitUtah.com
The city leaning at dusk like the woman I see
resting on the rust of brick her two hands rinsed
in kitchen water When I cross Adams in a car,
climbing the street names that age where the valley
ages: Jefferson, Madison, Monroe; long past Lincoln
misplaced: bound to keep the municipal Grant
from the immigrant Wall; across the valley rising
like a bowl two hands make that still holds the lake
that gave it form: benches where the water receded,
primitive shorelines, the electoral road. Where it ends
our names go out; the sheer rock knots into a face,
mouthless, without tongue, like the nameless to us
who first brought her young to the shore, looked
down into the water, shapeless: city without form.
Mario Chard, born in Ogden and raised in Morgan Valley, is the author of “Land of Fire,” winner of the Dorset Prize and the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he lives in Atlanta. A version of this poem was published in the literary journal Weber: The Contemporary West.