By Charles M. Sumid      Copyright 2025     Written 1973

The arch never learned to be an arch
No blueprint guided its appearance

Wind found weakness in sandstone layers
Water followed hairline cracks for centuries

Grain by grain, the center departed
What fell away made space for sky

The surrounding stone holds its ground,
bears the weight it always carried

Now light passes through where rock once stood
Desert swallows nest in hollows they didn’t carve

The arch frames distant mesas, sunset colors,
passing clouds

It doesn’t know it makes a window
doesn’t feel the photographs taken
Rain still works its steady subtraction
Frost wedges wider what water began

Each winter adds its small revision
Each summer bakes the stone harder

The arch spans thirty feet of nothing,
supports tons with what’s missing

Its strength lives in the absent center,
its form found by what’s gone

Hikers pass beneath, voices echoing
The stone neither welcomes nor refuses

At night, stars show through the opening
The arch holds this piece of sky

without knowing it holds anything

Geologists measure its thinning crown,
predict centuries before collapse

The arch continues its slow erosion,
neither proud of its persistence

nor aware of its approaching end

Just stone arranged by absence,
shaped by loss,
standing because it hasn’t yet learned to fall