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

Lizard on the fault line

Consider certain tiny lizards, and that

long before
anyone could count
there was still math.

— Linda Kasischke

Is Art matter? Does Lizard matter? Ontological questions. What is not in doubt: Gravity. Matters every moment. Dark crevice, weightless.

Humans take gravity as granted. Antique certainty, wheels spin, rain falls, ice melts, water drips. Trickles. Remembers.  Rivers flow, flood, pool, press dams. Gravity “generates” in the techno-version of Genesis spinning magnetic jostling electrons spawning Electricity. Bonneville: god of appliance desire.

None of this new to Lizard. Lizard knows gravity. Lizard Is Gravity. Actually and metonymically. Lizard stands forth. Lizard not to be seen, omnipresence unknown. Simply gets by, gets on with it. Lizard still, then gone. We say dart, dash, disappear, adios. Gravity has its verbs.

“Climate Change” no longer grasped. Idea cracking, concept fracturing, spalling, spilling.  The Great Fault where no fault lies like polycrisis lies. Bar graphs, peaks, valleys, picturing nullspace, glacial shimmer. Cards on the table. Shards in the dust. Gravity wins. Lizard knows.

 

NOTES
— Photos: Block and Fault country, Northern Great Basin; waters seeking the deep do not run to the sea. Lizard abides, memory lingers, dreaming.
— Foreground of second photo: groundstone mortar for grinding or crushing.
— Linda Kasischke from the poem The Accident in The Infinitesimals (2014 Copper Canyon Press)