Greater Chaco fundraiser

 

I read my poem “The Tour or Fracking is Fracking” at the Greater Chaco fundraiser, Saturday May 12, at the Santa Fe Art Institute. Thank you to Jules and John for the anthology and for donating copies of Water to the cause. Daniel Tso invited speakers and one poet. Such an honor.

“The Fracking Reality Tour” is led by Daniel Tso and Robert Tohe, supported by the Diné Cares organization, with assistance from the Sierra Club NM. Many many groups have gone out with Daniel and Robert to see the horror of fracking and the destruction happening on Navajo Land since Lena and I went with them three years ago.   40,000 frack wells and counting.  The wasted methane is burned into the growing toxic cloud. Neighboring states participate in the methane capture program, but our governor continues not to enforce the capture rule. Too bad, as the profits from methane sales can go directly to school programs. Colorado models this behavior as NM continues to burn up 40-50 million dollars a year in wasted, polluting methane. Hah! This issue is an on-going battle. Not to mention the toxic particulates the fracking releases into the air and water and bodies of those who have lived there for generations. Daniel’s clan has inhabited this area since the beginning of Time. He spoke of the sacred energy under the surface of the soil, energy that the money-mad oil and gas companies are seeking in destructive ways.

And some of that is in my poem p.108 in Water. The basket containing the copies of Water, some seeds for hope, and a few gift cards, went for $250. Thank you, again, Jules and John.

Here’s the poem

 

The Tour or “Fracking Is Fracking”

 

We headed south at Counselors, NM, 17 miles west of Cuba

the quiet red rock, pastoral beauty,

known as Sisnataal,  ‘wide belt mountain’

 

Rains have turned Navajo land green, but

off the highway, fracking for oil is everywhere, even in

the velvet, hut-like hills Georgia O’Keefe dubbed The Black Place.

Coal in the soil colors the mounds that look like

whales or hundreds of igloos in grey rock.

Red soils layer yellow, dappled with green on the cliffs.

The badlands are beautiful from El Niño surface water

The elder named Daniel sits in the back with me

to tell stories of fracking and drilling in the land where

the horse spirit was created, as told in stories, he says,

through the generations. He told us how his mama spanked

him or his siblings if they ran on the shifting sand hills.

I think of O’Keefe, and her Stieglitz in NY

making his fortune on these hills,

wild flowers and cow bones, her craggy face.

 

The piled up “blue pipes in the ditch run domestic water,”

Daniel says, to the parched lands of Dinétah.

More, perhaps, “in case, the acquifer in use is ruined.

This project is federally funded.”

Fracking water awaits injection into the land

in ominous metal bins at each site. Each site painted an earth

tone to match as closely as possible, the surrounding colors.

Each site just one of thousands, unmanned and likely to leak.

The initial fracking cocktail infuses almost a mile into the earth

then a mile horizontally in two directions, releasing wasted

methane to burn off, seeking crude oil, creating poisoned water.

The methane lost in this last year could have heated 350,000

New Mexican homes all winter long.

Oil trucks like wooly mammoths rampage

soft dirt roads, destroy tarmac on highways,

create traffic on the dusty paths used by families,

farmers, and school kids in busses. Many passed us that day.

The royalties and taxes from selling, not wasting the methane

might have gone to schools. All 42 million of it.

 

Each landowner or allottee gets a royalty check when

the oil hits the well head. It’s

not enough for the ruination of sacred land,

a people, their history and future, but it is a huge

amount of money in hand. Our neighboring states

capture and use their methane.  Our Gov wants

our methane burning up into the methane clouds.

 

Exhausted from the bumpy ride and the sorrow, heading back

I ask Daniel questions about the sixties, the seventies

in Navajo Land.  Two elders can talk like that.  He tells me about

his brother hanging out with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in Taos.

I ask him if LSD hit the Rez. He smiles. We remember the days.

I won’t forget, the fracking stations,

the squat, toad-like silos of oil, gas,

and the misleading term “produced water,”

the euphemism for poison, awaiting injection back into the Rez.

There is a creek that will burn if you put a match to it,

a woman from Di-né Cares said on Gene Grants’ news show.