SIMULACRA: A la playa

What figures in this clay: gives a sharper bone?

What turns the spirit white? Wanting to abbreviate?

The years in the blood keep us naked to the bone. 

Light breaks down the days to printless stone. 

—Duane Niatum, from his poem The Art of Clay

(CLICK to enlarge any photo)

A playa, Oregon, Northern Great Basin, late August 2020. Fake flat stuck “Pronghorn” imported from ? by a company in Pennsylvania called Montana. Two muzzleloader hunters emerge from their fake-foresty hunt-hut — a blind. We chat. Friendly, they say, With you guys here Pronghorn wont come today. Rut season. Thirst season. They go off on their quad hidden behind the BLM’s backhoed mound, to return next day. We go hiking, looking with sky-eyes, juniper-sense, rock-n-rollin’... 

Picture Rock Pass: Angle of Suppose

I do not want 3D glasses, friend, it’s already 3D.

Look up look out.   Out—what is that.

—Jorie Graham, from The Enmeshments in Fast (2017).

Summer Lake basin, northern terminus viewed from Winter Rim.

Center:  Ana Springs reservoir, part of the extensive state-owned Summer Lake Wildlife Refuge which, diked and channeled, manages water from Ana Springs overflow. A containment.

Green circle: Alfalfa, often shipped to the far east as animal feed, two, three cuts a year.

Far left:  Klippel Point, a block-lift escarpment, the east-west Carlon Road disappearing toward distant Diablo Mountain.   

Fire July 2017 scorched northern Winter Rim, charred logs blazing in sunrise, portending a heating landscape.  Thousands of acres of old Juniper trees clearcut in the northern Great Basin, an un-native devastated terrain intended to hasten water run-off.  Sometimes a controlled burn follows. In testimony: a stump near Picture Rock Pass.  

 

The well-known Picture Rock Pass petroglyph, near Highway 31.

The definitive Oregon Geographic Names, 6th edition, 1992, strangely states: “Picture Rock Pass  … The name comes from some strange designs or pictures on the rock about a hundred feet south of the highway.  These peculiar marks, made by Indians, are strongly suggestive of a WPA style painting project operated by the aborigines.”  The most-recent volume, 7th edition, 2003, revised to simply:  “The name comes from some designs or pictures on the rocks about a hundred feet south of the highway.”

A placed rock near an abandoned Native American village site.

Marker, prayer, respect.

A petroglyph Luther Cressman did not see, but from a photograph in the 1930s he called it a horse design. (Site 26, Petroglyphs of Oregon 1937). Maybe. This picture, an imagined being, a representation, an unknown, moving on... in place, through time.

North of the Pass below Egli Rim an abandoned spring fenced in by settlers, by travelers through the pass between Silver Lake and Summer Lake.  Back when, water piped, channeled to fire-hollowed logs for stock watering. A containment.

Walking sandy ground, downslope, a few petroglyphs one local named in a self-published booklet purchased years ago at Summer Lake store: The Medicine Man Trail.

Look up look out. Another angle of suppose.

Lake County Oregon August-September 2020.  Photos Douglas Beauchamp

SAND

The low voices rise and fall
as they divide up
heaven, shadows, grains of sand.
-Tomas Tranströmer from the poem Solitude (from Swedish, trans. Robert Bly)

Sand is crushed mountains and the ashes of everything that has
  existed.
The sand dunes cross hot countries like stripes of fire.
Sand covers the planets. Moonbeams are reflections in sand.
Sand is the last thing on earth.
Time sleeping.
— Rolf Jacobsen from the poem Sand; from Norwegian trans. Roger Greenwald

Images: a place near Three Corners, the what-is-now convergence of Oregon, California, Nevada.  Photos Douglas Beauchamp May 2020

GOLD 2020

Gold prices hit a new record close of $2,021 per ounce overnight — settling above $2,000 for the first time. — CNBC, August 4, 2020

IMAGE:  Old Glyph, Coso Wilderness, near Death Valley, Inyo County CA.

Points upstream to old mine encampment.

Photo Douglas Beauchamp, March 2018

"THE KINGS OF THE WORLD . . . “

The kings of the world are growing old,
and they shall have no inheritors.
Their sons died while they were boys,
and their neurasthenic daughters abandoned
the sick crown to the mob.

The mob breaks it into tiny bits of gold.
The Lord of the World, master of the age,
melts them in fire into machines,
which do his orders with low growls;
but luck is not on their side.

The ore feels homesick. It wants to abandon
the minting houses and the wheels
that offer it such a meager life.
And out of factories and payroll boxes
it wants to go back into the veins
of the thrown-open mountain,
which will close again behind it.

Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Robert Bly)

Between this world and the next

Photo:  Three Corners canyon OR-CA-NV. Douglas Beauchamp 2019

Toward Mount Scott

a poem by Sy Hoahwah

Toward Mount Scott
it is sharp as a knife.

The bad roads lead to lost roads.
The lost roads lead to the same

empty spot. People sometimes go
to lonely places for power.

Eagles are sometimes choked,
dragonflies lassoed.

Smaller birds follow ghosts
to eat off the bugs.

Line of barbed wire
marks the boundary

between this world
and the next.
…
About Sy Hoahwah
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sy-hoawah
Toward Mount Scott included in New Poets of Native Nations.

Edited by Heid E. Erdrich.  Graywolf Press, 2018