Monument Valley, Utah. Photo by dsdugan, courtesy of Wikimedia Creative Commons.
Towards the end of the plague year
we learned that someone somehow
transported a ten-foot high
silvery metal object
to a remote canyon in the Utah desert
drilling through layers and layers of red rock
there it stands, a silent sentinel
under a Western sky
and then, just as mysteriously, it disappeared.
But why build it at all?
As a joke? a homage? an example of environmental art?
or a riddle worthy of Nietzsche
on the nature of the universe
the meaning of life
how things can vanish without warning
this slim slab as
strange and wonderful
as Kubrick’s black monolith.
Image courtesy Utah Department of Public Safety.
