Water: Earth Ver. 2.021

And like everyone, I took, I was taken
I dreamed

I was betrayed:

Earth was given to me in a dream
In a dream I possessed it
-- Louise Glück from The Seven Ages (2001)

The stillness was complete, as if the lake absorbed not only noise, but time itself.
-- Kapfa Kassabova from To The Lake 2020

Weather. Climate. Seasons. Ossifying classifications, jostling divinities: conjuring and swooning, dripping and melting, drying and yearning. Defiant!

Last week of April, days in Basin and Range country. Basin. Range. Each word streams images, intentions, unknowns through the dreaming mind. Through the eyes wide open. Each picture coalesces, glistening in the wind.  Each stone listening, what are we about.

Recalls photographs transmitted from “our” 2021 Mars landing — Perseverance! transmuted. MarsScapes — rocky dusty pocked — making clear once more: Earth remains the blue planet, a greening globe.

“Water is Life” poster perfect, too true to be comprehensible.

Earth 2.021: Version Here Now. Recommended for all users. Of water.

Seasons: lakeshore shelter, circular petroglyphs on basalt

Photos: Lake Abert, Chewaucan Basin, Lake County, Oregon. April 2021 Douglas Beauchamp

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CODA

Will we soon remember from where we’ve come? The water.

And once remembered, will we return to that first water, and in doing so return to ourselves, to each other, better and cleaner? 

Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do? 

—Natalie Diaz [1]

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NOTES

Lake County, Oregon: over 8000 sq mi. One human per square mile, thousands of cattle, lizards, hundreds of pronghorn, tens of thousands of birds: water-seekers all, on the move.  

Lake County drought map, Lake Abert center, in the Red zone: Dense maroon=Exceptional drought. Stark Red=Extreme drought. Ochre=Severe drought. https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/

[1] Natalie Diaz, concluding lines of the poem The First Water Is the Body. Published in New Poets of Native Nations, Edited by Heid E. Erdrich, Graywolf Press (2018), and in Postcolonial Love Poem (2020).