Abiqui Lake Series:

Abiqui Lake is in northwest New Mexico, in desert country associated with the famous artist, Georgia O’Keefe, whose Ghost Ranch is just up highway 84. The lake is a reservoir, formed from the damming of the Rio Chama in 1963, and then raised in 1986. Over the decades the water changes have had powerful effects on the surrounding vegetation.

This gallery is especially important to me, because of the way I’m struck by the remains of these trees. Like everyone else, I’m drawn to these southwest desert places by the famous, huge, eyeworthy spectacles in the national parks. But over time I’ve been equally grabbed by the eyeworthiness of smaller, less-dramatic elements of these landscapes: especially the desert juniper.

Junipers are famous for their endurance. Their beginnings, their middles, and their ends stretch out, with luck, over centuries. They regularly live 500-700 years in the harsh, ungenerous climate. Slowly, slowly, slowly they grow. Though they don’t grow tall, their thick bunches of deep-green, aromatic needles often provide the only shade to be found, for centuries. That green also camouflages the shapes of their trunks and branches.

Then, at last, they die slowly, so slowly. And as they do, the needles diminish, the camouflage withdraws to reveal raw, strange, twisted shapes. Often, they come to look like us, captured in some instant of extremity. They erupt, they writhe, they coil, they stretch. Enigmatic statues. Scattered about the landscape, they compose an unlikely high-desert sculpture garden. And yet they’re only dead or dying trees. Not carved by human hand. Not chiseled. Not forged. Not plotted or arranged or galleried or museum-ed. Not imagined. Perfectly natural art. Perfectly artful nature. Mysteriously unmysterious.

When we notice such things, we wonder how did they come to be this way? We stand before a juniper, and wonder how could such striking and improbable beauty have been created by the mindless operations of the natural world, and especially a world as dry as this? With what we have come to know in the early 21st century, we could likely explain how the history of interactions between plant, weather, and geology have provided us with just this artful tree at just this moment. But that would explain only the tree, not the art.

 The fact is, if we’re willing to notice, high desert art is simply out there.

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Still Moving

tony jackson

 The high desert juniper knots and twists

 through decades, stretching across centuries,

 struggling in silence

 with wind and earth and sun;

 sculpting itself by fits and starts

 into its own lonely memorial.

 A tireless well-digger

 It drives down its one root

 through stone records of ocean and dune,

 finding a fault, threading a seam,

 tapping, always tapping -- into just enough water to live.

 And the desert provides,

 just enough water for life,

 but none for death;

 without the luxury of water, there is no rotting here.

 Without water,

 no wet resting back into loamy soil

 that will grow following generations.

 No such consoling continuity.

In the desert, life leaves

 death as drying remains – slowly,

 so slowly.

 At its end, animal life evaporates all at once,

 One final damp breath signs its expiration.

 But in the desert, wind and sun

 work carefully with what remains;

 invisible fingers spirit away, cell by cell,

 the wet matter of the once-living,

 leaving at last off-white bones, stretched skin, or,

 like tombs without bodies, the shells of insects

Without the luxury of water, no rotting here.

But nothing all at once about the juniper.

 It dies as it lives, slowly, so slowly,

 molecule by molecule, through decades

 stretching across centuries. What's left sculpts itself

 as neither dry bone nor empty tomb.

 It remains still rooted,

 simply without water,

 no longer luxurious with life,

 but not shriveled, not empty,

 not quite dried to death.

 Passing through the desert,

 we rootless animals,

 if we should care to attend,

 may witness signs of the juniper’s remains.

 If we should choose to look,

 they twist into still spirits of human movement;

 Like stoic pantomimes performing statues

 they go on grasping the earth:

 now still dancing

 still celebrating

 still reaching

 still swirling

 still praying…

 now still moving

 as we pass on.

 If we should choose to listen,

 they speak to us in voiceless figures;

with arid tongues of eye-poetry.

 eloquent desiccation deep-rooted in the rock

They provide their own perfect testaments.

 After struggling so slowly for so long

 with dry wind, hard earth, hot sun

 and just enough water,

 they're standing still.

 Rootless, we may simply pass them by, should we choose.

 Without water, they offer no consolation, no luxury,

 but, still, always a kind of providence…always still moving...

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