Upon the Proposed Mining of “Thacker Pass, Nevada”. A poem by Sarah Gar, a visitor to the land of the Paiute and Shoshone people and the sagebrush creatures.
It’s quiet here.
And I’m not talking about experimental silence, American guru silence, or any sleek human site that seeks inner peace (and other noise) to drown out the drawing-down and drying-up of every sacred thing.
I’m talking about silence of lands beyond witness, a silence embedded and embedding, the one nestling in the nighthawk’s cries and cradling these words. Tall sagebrush touches it — 4 feet 33 millimeters of branching space, where voice and silence play by listening, weaving water and light without worrying who appears as what before whom.
It’s as if nothing can be said to arrive or leave in wild places. Even our breath cannot be said to enter this place where it meets other selves always here and already inside. But when Grandmother comes, wakes the fire with practiced taps, the flames flare in reminder of whose Spirits keep this place.
Even in “deserted” places dry soil knows to gather soft and firm around water, forming delicate strata to nourish roots and catch the drifting seed. We, too, know to gather, asking if we are also this place, and if so, how we can return.
To get here we must track ourselves by species memory, a long way back, to when losing one’s way first became possible. We trace back to the end’s beginning, when the volume had to rise, to create an endless diversion, to mask the pesky screams of women and slaves.
Yes, we tracked ourselves, even did a blood spatter analysis. A few facts emerged to tell us:
- We are the losing and the lost.
- There’s nothing lonelier than empire, and nothing stranger than killing one’s beloved.
These facts cleared the room. Even history couldn’t erase them. The clock ticked. Corporations continued to cut down the ancient ones. And so we rose, rotating and revolving pulled forward by the falling-apart feeling which is love.
This must be love because, as sung by Paiute and Shoshone, danced by pronghorn and coyote, this place would hold forever, streams passing through trouts’ gills, sun glancing off scales and into eagle’s eyes as she watches over. Past and future would nest together, quiet as grouse eggs, speckled and constellating, in tacit reference to each other. Birth and death would spiral together, strong and fragile as pyrg shell, and we would learn again to listen and to hold this language, the spinning of the silence that found us first, soft as jackrabbit, buried as bones, strong spines of sage and mountain song.
As a former English professor from the East Coast, Sarah now focuses on writing and activism in the Pacific Northwest. Her poetry grieves patriarchal and colonial violence, summons reverence for the natural world, and upholds matriarchal cultures which cherish life.