[Julie Steiner]

Hi, Alex!

As others have noted, there's not a lot of plot or emotional development here — it's more of a sketchbook of impressionistic scenes. Which is okay, but I still feel as if my inner weather should be changed more than it is, after reading a poem that's this long.

Picky little details:

I wondered how the Colorado and the Rio Grande ended up in the same poem, since the two rivers are pretty far apart.

I really don't get this bit:

For truth, I chart the codex like a map.
[Cross-posted—it's now revised to:
The codex close at hand—a kind of map.]

A codex is anything in the form of a book, almost always with a bound spine. In the library world, it's a term used to distinguish books from scrolls or loose pages. Has the narrator has brought a book along hiking? (I thought it might be a guidebook, but "like a map" suggests otherwise, because guidebooks usually contain maps.) Are the different strata of the exposed cliff-sides being compared to the edge of a book? Is this a non-sequitur reference to the Bible? I'm stumped.

The reference to genuflecting mesas made me want to picture the scree at the bottom of close-to-vertical cliffs looking like kneeling legs. But as Hilary noted, a genuflection is a motion rather than a static position. And generally a genuflection bends one knee forward and one knee downward, before rising again.

[I like what you've done in this revision to vary the "Time" repetend.]

Cheers,
Julie