Dark Edge of Awe

Things rock-solid change places with thoughts tenuous, then change back again. —Ellen Meloy

Absorb light emit dark

a turning edge

rhythmic notchings carved 

millennia before now

wind burnished

blackly varnished 

clay dust adhered

manganese 

a mirroring absent reflection

on gazing an inner space

opens 

outer time congeals

dark edge tilting swinging

toward stars

…

Across the flat desert

of Carson Sink

of a bright morning listening 

music across the expanse

several miles distant

from loudspeakers 

of the US Naval Air Station

Star-Spangled Banner

Images: Ancient carvings on boulders on shoreline terraces formed by waves of Lake Lahontan, known as Grimes Point, east of Carson Sink (central Nevada) and bordered by US Highway 50. Poem & Pictures Douglas Beauchamp. As always... Click to expand.

In the 20th century, the material reality for this place, these stones, has often been one of destructive impacts and disregard. Roads through the site, bulldozing, quarrying, boulders displaced, removed, damaged or destroyed, painted signs and graffiti.  Beginning in the 1950s, the area was used as a trash dump for Fallon, a few miles to the northwest. Only since the 1970s have protective measures by the BLM encouraged care and respect.

The stones abide; the petroglyphs resound. Though the rock art meanings may seem mute in this presence, the carvings induce listening and looking, as unfurling intimations - there and here, past and future.  A necessary and material sense of change turns, refolds, embraces this earth.

NOTES

— Ellen Meloy in The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on desert, sea, stone, and sky. (2002) 

—Grimes Point Archaeological Area (BLM).

https://www.blm.gov/visit/grimes-pointhidden-cave-archaeological-site

—Naval Air Station Fallon:  “Home to the Fighting Saints of VFC-13, the Desert Outlaws of Strike Fighter Wing Pacific, and the Naval Strike Air Warfare Center, NAS Fallon serves as the Navy’s premier tactical air warfare training center.” A scattered patchwork of five bombing ranges comprising 100,000 acres inscribe on the nearby terrain of Northern Nevada. http://www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/cnrsw/installations/nas_fallon.html

—Modern research on the region’s rock art began with Julian Steward (1929); enhanced by Martin Baumhoff and Robert Heizer (1958; 1962); followed by Karen Nissen’s detailed documentation in the 1970s (1982).  

—References/sources provided on request

CODA

Away from you 

Away from you, 

alone, I can come 

—a leaf flickers
on the river's light skin 

Together 

we are two stones like one stone rolling 

rolling down on the riverbed   two

light black stones 

we have always been here 

once we were one stone 

—the other thing holds us 

in its mouth 

—Jean Valentine in The Cradle of Real Life

In recognition of the courageous and resilient people of Ukraine in this time of darkness