Mirage (revisited)

[mnaz]

Black Rock country sits lower than most of Nevada’s high desert, more bleak and dry, mountains more beaten and worn to scarred chocolate ridges, wondrous mounds and ribs that rim the playa, the blinding ocean. In winter it fills a little with mountain runoff but sees little rain. Root for a rebel, root for a cloud. Rain drifts from their billowed bellies in vain, turned away in dissipated ghostly shrouds, a dozen of them on the far range sometimes. When rain comes it is clumsy with vengeance, impetuous and wasteful, yet they manage to run a few cows, not sure how. Picture her on a cloud, one of those gone-scapes. She sees far the peaks, they seem so far yet trouble comes. Root for one of the strays to get loose, lost in the next wide, long flat, picked up on the next road, you can only make it so far.

Nothing makes sense on the playa. You have small rocks the size of boulders and blinding span, can’t tell the size of anything, and if you try for the shore, for relief, everything is naked and burnt. The air is too thin, climate too dry, corridors too long and prospects too remote on a blank canvas with bumps on its edge, belly up to deep black spiked with heavens. What if you had to make a living in pure quiet? Quiet doth not a living make, but noise. You find little noise, conclude no living is being made; most of it is expired cattle country and peace, though it can change quickly in the highlands, can’t thwart every storm up that high, backlit amber on malevolent sky and blackened ridge to rim the battlefield. It comes quickly, cover your head.

No limits on a boundless mineral sky, where weathered men lived on a barren arc and sear wind sings through rotted planks, shot riddled scrap, a ’48 flatbed chassis, and tires go brittle in the sun, fissures open. Hard rock fortune lay just out of reach under a nameless peak, but hardship came with blasting caps anyway; nothing is out of reach on boundless, deep enough in rock to lose your sense of depth, and no sense of depth or time on the arc. Grotesque cottonwoods watch auburn tides roll in and recede on a lucent sea where no sea can exist, and Humboldt Range is a snowcapped tsunami at the edge, about to break.

The desert was infinite at first, and then curiously, trail hands began to point at high peaks. Fox Mountain, Wheeler Peak, Navajo Mountain. Landmarks. And you realized that if you were to climb them you might, in some cases, see past the edge of desert into the noisome green. Pompous landmarks and their pointing, up so high as to shrink horizons. It was better when the desert had no landmarks, nor water, nor silver and gold for that matter, endless distraction of extraction, they give too much away. A little elevation goes a long way in depths of rock and light; views of haggard mesas compel as well as views from atop one of them. You can take that hill! See for a hundred miles, past the end of your nose.

So you're swirling in back eddies of dry oceans, in the dreamy spans of frontier, the reason even the toughest sons of bitches on horseback write poems to the range. How did you get from such a blatant escape attempt on four tires, mileposts, dashed line fever and straight-ahead mania to such a mind drifting into the depths of a side vision? Must have turned off somewhere.

You remember a ragged motel in Eugene with the “O” burned out, insidious pull of the interstate still coursing, map spread out on the bed, bourbon in your styrofoam, the weather chick prattling on about thunderstorms in Dubuque, essence of the wacky weed wafting through an open window, and “GO DVCKS” on the sign board. College town. “Only 200 more miles to the edge.” Must have turned off somewhere. Only burnished sculpture here, and long long corridors, space and poetics to the end of things, and you can actually see the rock, the shape of it.

What do you have against lonesome? Never seem to work it out, distant and static even in kicking up dust along abandoned tracks, rely too much on the kindness of deserts, never find a place to stop and grow your own, can’t shuck the road, its myth and paintings, scrawl twisting into sunsets you could follow and retrieve, chalk etchings into all shades of golden ecru and their parallel dimensions, the possibility of amnesia. But when rare clouds touch down, heavy in low sun season, scorched earth blooms in wild colors, red orange blues of the instant, flower booms drifting across slopes into hard canyons of the coming heat, you have to look fast.

And then, no life. You are the life, bold and vivid against rock and sand as you vanish into the same sweep and curve of space, into emptiness that was never literal, the hawk aeries hidden on cliff tops, chukars chattering in rock ripples at dusk, home to meet family, tell a few jokes, and snakes twisting away from your pointless tire tracks, shaken out of reverie. On a cracked lake bed it may come down to microbes, little else but wind and your own breath. In the black vacuum of space it may come down to imaginary particles. Something must fill the empty.

Tale of a compound mirage: Kumiva Valley under the Blue Wing Mountains as you approach a deep blue lake, an image strong enough to overrule reason. It is clearly a lake, not a mirage, which slowly and stubbornly recedes to white, leaving room for imagination at each point. Maybe late-season rains filled the playa. Now you see vehicles making dust on the playa. No, only dust devils. Closer now. No, one of them must be a truck, slender plume sent up from a black object. Closer. No, it was a dust devil, and the black object is a rock, no longer showcased so absurdly.

[justwalt]

this is a sign...
get out of the sun now!!!

at the crest of time, i was there, but without
the frame of mind to take it in correctly, i think.
i hurried across the high desert mostly at night.

but then i did cut corners from time to time walking
through the southern deserts and camp a night or two.

i did take in the wonder and beauty that i saw wherever i saw it,
but given a second chance, i might only hope to find the words
to describe it as well as you do

maybe this fall

[mnaz]

glad the writing spoke to you, walt. it's tough writing to do, mainly since I've been separated from the great silent emptiness for so long-- all sorts of hard family issues to deal with in my Rain Belt hometown the last two years. several paragraphs here began as poems. a lot of my writing from the last eight months is like that. hard to weave them all together sometimes. thanks.