Most poems about the Grand Canyon send us straight to the view. Mary F. C. Pratt's "Skyharbor" sits its speaker on a curb with her back to it. "The canyon eroded behind me," she says, and the line is quietly devastating. The great landscape goes on with its slow work while she is busy with phone calls, tickets and luggage. The poem never states why the trip has been cut short, but the clues add up. She phones "my sister, my brother, the doctor in the ER," and then, in a line that trails off without a verb, "To my mother one last time." Judging by the text, a family crisis, probably a dying mother, has pulled her away from the holiday.
The poem's restraint is its main technique. There is no rhyme and no regular rhythm, only plain, conversational free verse. The opening stanza reads like reportage: people "strolled," "bought coffee," "called to their children," while a man in tight jeans "sang off key." The details are slightly comic, and the comedy stings. Ordinary life carries on around someone whose life is coming apart. Even "where the telephones connect" has an ironic edge, since the connections that matter most are the ones about to be lost. The speaker's grief is never named. It shows in what she notices and in the way her sentences shrink, so that "one last time" is the shortest and quietest line in its stanza. Her husband's tasks, "cancelled the train / and called Southwest," show practical busyness doing the work of coping.
Then comes the pigeon. Everything around it is noise: "gray noise, exhaust, confusion of taxi and talk." The bird moves through this with a lovely precision, "one pink foot in front of the other." The sounds of the line, with its bobbing "b" and tipping "t," mimic the walk. Pratt makes the pigeon unglamorous, "picking scraps and crumbs," but she also pays it close, tender attention. The odd plural "luggages," which is not standard English, adds to the clutter the bird has to navigate.
The eight-line list that follows is the poem's strangest and most moving stretch. These are fragments with no verbs: "Sun rise over the Grand Canyon. / The arch of Angel's Window." They read like a photo album, or like memories flipping past in the mind of someone who is no longer there. Almost every item is concrete, a place, a color, a smell, a sound. The exception is the one abstract line, "A troubled sense of immensity." That "troubled" is the poem's closest approach to confession. The canyon's vastness is no longer simply beautiful. It now sits uneasily beside a mother's death, or the prospect of it. Even so, the list holds consolation. "Pines touched and healed by fire" suggests that destruction can be survived, an idea the speaker can only half-grasp in her situation.
The poem's quiet cleverness comes in its closing image. Earlier, the speaker remembers "the green thread of river a mile below my boots." At the end she watches the pigeon "dodge the river of traffic." One river is vast and ancient and the other is a stream of taxis, but the pigeon is a living creature crossing it with small, careful steps. The speaker, stuck on her pack, can only watch. Then the bird does what she cannot: "she flew away." The title, "Skyharbor," a compound that sounds like an airport, joins the sky and a place of shelter, and it fits both the departing bird and the traveler waiting to be carried home.
The poem is significant because it refuses to make grief grand. A less careful writer might have set the speaker's loss against the canyon's scale and let the canyon win, or tried to wring a lesson from it. Pratt does neither. She lets the immense and the tiny sit side by side, and she lets the smallest thing, a pigeon with a pink foot, hold the reader's attention at the moment it is most needed.