An hour before the Mora County Commission meeting, the chair of the commission prepares her notes on the oil and gas regulation she will propose. Her audience will be a room of fragmented activists fighting to keep Shell out of the remote, northern New Mexico valley. In the next town over, I hold my infant to my chest and sob. The bruises around my collarbone form a shadowy necklace. Across the country, in Pennsylvania, a woman ignites tap water with a match for a crowd of journalists wielding cameras. In a magistrate courtroom in Albuquerque, the judge asks a woman if she has photos that reveal the black eyes her boyfriend gave her. Across the city in a federal courtroom, Judge Browning listens as Shell claims they are a disadvantaged and oppressed group suffering from injuries inflicted by Mora County. And in the infinite darkness that precedes time, Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and creation, slams her black feet into the earth until it shatters.
The way in is not always straightforward. Truth appears and disappears under cover. Doorways have to be found—or created. Definitions presented. Still, words do not breach the distance between what is and what can be known. Poetry and science surge from the same source, seeking what cannot be seen or felt, unearthing strata of significance buried within a single observation, or word. Differences between words blur. (Consider “tool” and “weapon.” Does the truth ever not hurt?) Language conceals as much as it reveals, a renewable resource of morphing meaning. Sometimes the only way to understand something is to assemble fragments and hold them up to the light.
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