A Wall in Modoc Country

I'm living just as a century ends. 

A great leaf, that God and you and I 
have covered with writing
turns now, overhead, in strange hands.
We feel the sweep of it like a wind.  

We see the brightness of a new page 
where everything yet can happen.

Unmoved by us, the fates take its measure 
and look at one another, saying nothing.

—Rainer Marie Rilke

Plans

Now and then I lay down plans
to solve the world's problems.

My plans eliminate longing from stories,
remove exhaustion from groans,
place full stops in runaway sentences,
rescue even soldiers at checkpoints
along with children
who grow up in detention centers,
mothers who wear their wardrobes
of patience, and also laborers
who commit suicide
off scaffolds. I save the whole world
as a star might in well-drafted screenplays,
with plans that my impoverished
creativity ultimately kills. My plans,

they would have worked,
they would have saved us all.

—Maya Abu Al-Hayyat 

NOTES
—Rainer Marie Rilke (from Rilke’s Book of Hours, translated from the German by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)
—Maya Abu Al-Hayyat (from You Can Be The Last Leaf:  Selected Poems. 2022, translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah
—Photos by Douglas Beauchamp, May 2026 (click to enlarge)

The lives and ways of the Modocs of Lost River country, their displacement and anguish, occur again each century, each year, this year as well. Repeated, cycled in and through the many places.  
Rilke’s poetic vision and that of Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, a Palestinian writer living in Jerusalem, offer bracing — and embracing — truths. 

This sense of presence stands forth in and of this stone wall near pooling water in ancient Modoc country.

Inyo Rising

The narrating voices that, entwined or in juxtaposition, tell us about the universe are only two. Light and gravity. In the story that emerges, the invisible holds sway. What we can observe is simply an exception.
—Ersilia Vaudo

 

But man cannot master this lesson, 
the lesson of stone: 
he tumbles, his body crumbles, 
his word and voice unravel.

Fire, water and tree 
steal themselves:
dying, they seek a mineral body 
and find the road to glory: 
steady, the stone shines 
like a hard new rose.
—Pablo Neruda  

I want the light 
locked inside to awaken:
crystalline flower,
wake as I do:

eyelids raise the curtain 
of endless earthen time 
until deeply buried eyes 
flash clear enough again 
to see their own clarity.
—Pablo Neruda

NOTES
—Top photo, to honor Earth Day:  Earthrising beyond Moon, from Artemis II, NASA, March 2026

—Photos: Petroglyphs on a rock wall, Owens Valley, Inyo County CA, March 2026, Douglas Beauchamp
—Ersilia Vaudo (Astrophysicist with  the European Space Agency), from The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions (2025, trans from Italian by Vanessa Di Stefano)
—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973, Nobel 1971), from Stones of the Sky.
1970/Spanish, 1987/English trans by James Nolan, Copper Canyon Press

Power of a Mountain

 

(Birch Mountain, right, March 2026)

 

When I was still a young man, I saw Birch Mountain in a dream. It said to me:
"You will always be well and strong. Nothing can hurt you and you will live to an old age." After this Birch Mountain came and spoke to me whenever I was in trouble and told me that I would be all right. That is why nothing has happened to me and why I am so old now. —Jack Stewart

 

In 1926-27, in Owens Valley, anthropologist Julian Steward listened to and recorded the life story of Jack Stewart, an elderly Paiute man. His Indian name: Hoavadunuki’.  Jack Stewart born in his mother’s village, tovowahamatui, now Big Pine, and lived there at the time Steward heard his story, noting, “The data presented in Jack's life demonstrate primarily this importance of the vision. he is evidently of a mind predisposed to hallucinations, interpreted as supernatural communications.”

 

Julian Steward continues: 
Although the irrepressible dreamer had many visions, this one which brought him his "power" was the most important. Birch mountain, pa'o'karanwa (pa'o, rocky, karanwa, boulder) or sunuyüsi’, is one of the most magnificent of the Sierra Nevada peaks as seen from Big Pine, rising to more than 14,000 feet, or more than 10,000 feet above the valley. Success in hunting, fighting, traveling, and even in gambling are assured him by his power, Birch Mountain. 

 

 

This petroglyph, a loose drawn style on a sloping crevice on a rock rim facing Birch Mountain.  A rim with dozens of other petroglyphs. Follow along with the possibilities as I speculate.

 

I see a spirit figure. Below two upright ears, which shape a head, two arms extend. One downward emitting or contacting supernatural power through the hand.  The other arm loops down entwining body-like. Upper left, a vaporous cloud of energy animates or is animated by the figure. This is not a logical event. A vision; this description is imaginative representing, I suggest, a quest for contact, or indeed power’s actual arrival.

I do not suggest there's any direct relationship between Jack Stewart's dream of Birch Mountain and this petroglyph. His story provides no account of petroglyphs.  It is an alignment of geography that provokes an alignment of action and belief.  A way of turning toward.       

 

Photos: Inyo County, California, southeast of Big Pine, facing Birch Mountain.

March 2026, Douglas Beauchamp

 

The thin snowpack of the eastern Sierras continues to melt away this pivotal year of global heating.

Carbon in the atmosphere is the highest since 30 million years ago. 

Time, Opaque

And so the days go by here, without incident.
    Even the occasional memorable event is soon erased without a trace under time’s huge, opaque mass. 
    —Han Kang

"For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations," Mary Austin wrote, "deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars ... wheeling to their stations in the sky, they make the poor world-fret of no account. Of no account you who lie out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you and howls and howls.” ...

 ... To be like the lean coyote is a comfort beneath a sky that is full of fog or full of sunlight and either way impenetrable. Such comfort is not a reason for carelessness. Precisely because you might not know everything — because the night answers but not with words you can understand, and the stars swing above you, moving, as Austin tells us, as if "on some stately service not needful to declare,“ you must accept certain responsibilities — among them the task of taking care.
    —Kendra Atleework

 Click photo, zoom in for detail

What is the meaning of our brief stay in this world? How difficult is it for us to remain human, come what may? In the darkest night, there is language that asks what we are made of, that insists on imagining into the first person perspectives of the people and living beings that inhabit this planet; language that connects us to one another. 

 

Literature that deals in this language inevitably holds a kind of body heat. Just as inevitably, the work of reading and writing literature stands in opposition to all acts that destroy life. I would like to share the meaning of this award, which is for literature, with you – standing here in opposition to violence together. 
    —Han Kang from her Nobel Prize speech (December 2024, translated from Korean by Maya West)

NOTES
—Han Kang, top: Greek Lessons: A Novel (2023). Han Kang awarded the Nobel in Literature, 2024
—Kendra Atleework, Miracle Country: A Memoir (2020)
—Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain (1903)
Both write of the country east of the Sierras, the Owens Valley, Inyo County, California
—Photos:  Inyo County, California, March 2026, Douglas Beauchamp

 

ASTROLITHICS

Galaxies originate from quantum fluctuations in the primordial universe, imprinted as traces in the cosmic background radiation. The tiny ripples of matter, which were stretched to enormous dimensions during the inflation, were the seeds of the subsequent formation of astronomical structures, shaped by gravitational attraction.
—Ersilia Vaudo

It probably started in poetry; almost everything does.
—Raymond Chandler

It is the rock where tranquil must adduce
Its tranquil self, the main of things, the mind,

The starting point of the human and the end,
That in which space itself is contained, the gate
To the enclosure, day, the things illumined

By day, night and that which night illumines,
Night and its midnight-minting fragrances,
Night’s hymn of the rock, as in a vivid sleep.
—Wallace Stevens

NOTES
—Ersilia Vaudo in The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions (2025, trans Italian)
—Raymond Chandler in "The Simple Art of Murder" (1944)
—Wallace Stevens from the poem "The Rock" (1954)

—Photos: Douglas Beauchamp, Lassen County CA
—Below:  Wallace Stevens from the poem  “Prologues To What Is Possible” (1954)
 

The metaphor stirred his fear. The object with which he was compared

Was beyond his recognizing. By this he knew that likeness of him extended

Only a little way, and not beyond, unless between himself
 

And things beyond resemblance there was this and that intended to be recognized,

The this and that in the enclosures of hypotheses

On which men speculated in summer when they were half asleep.