A cut in the land

A cut in the land, she said. They've wounded her, made their incisions with their machines and their breakdown to buildup theories, with their 80 dollars an hour to the smell of diesel as they push and pull their big little levers with their telling black shiny knobs. They cut the land, she said, and she called the land a woman, saying She doesn't want this, doesn't want these stones revealed, these stories made bare for all to see...

As if the rest of us could somehow diminish the magic and power of the world by merely casting a glance. No, she denounced all this, the cutting and rending, the peeling back, the uprooting, the exposing of layers, the digging and delving regardless of that first chapter where Adam was sent out to do just that...and Eve with her furrow.

I wanted to say to her, Who or what made THAT cut? Are we not natural ourselves? Are we otherworldly then, that whatever we touch is a sinful act? Are we Jain monks then? Who's going to brush away the path for us as we make our way through the world? Is that it? An untouchable class? Is that your designation for these bulldozer operators?

I could see it if her objection was to the ensuing erosion, the brown stain in the reef, the damning flow of the creek bringing the dust of the city to the ocean...but this rabid, no, not rabid, more Kathleen Na Houlihan-breast-beating-woe-is-me, and all the while finger-pointing at the man caressing the machine, who might think of himself as a sculptor for all we know.

What can the collective consciousness bring to bear here? What CAN it bear, I suppose, is the real question. If the Gulf of Mexico spill originates a mile deep, one might ask Why are we there at all?

On the other hand, isn't the robot an extension of our hand, just as the shiny knobs, just as the computer button...where is the mind in all this? The heart? Where does her weeping and wailing take us? What does it do for us? Yes, sorry for your loss. Someone cried, no doubt, for Ozymandias long before the desert sands swept in on their own sculpting wind like extensions of our breath—from our first to our last—surely not lost in melancholy but keen-eyed we must wake up like the chaos in a fall of blossoms from the cassia tree at the end of a dry month like this May; we must wake up and hold her tight against the poet's dying of the light, hold her close while the lamp shatters in the dust, and when she turns her back on all this...blow her a kiss.