My brother Joji was born into post-bomb-drop Japan. A “brown-skinned-bastard” from a Black American soldier. I imagine his young Japanese mother, as the earth shook for a moment, then blew away. What could she have thought about the new world of sickness, terror and a flood of American GIs? All I know is that trauma was passed into my brother. His life was always a long shot.
There is a blank-faced, concrete-block nuclear power plant right down the river from our town’s modern art museum – not far as the wind blows – from my home on the hill. It had some close calls with leaks, and I hear tell of cancer clusters nearby. It is shuttered now and a contracting company is disassembling its guts. All except the fuel-rods, which are too toxic to ship away to the “safe place” in Texas. Probably near native peoples’ land…or anyone poor. When a friend asked me to join her at the museum, to be part of creating and performing an artistic anti-nuclear protest, a Be-In, a union of souls in the rippling blue light of projected river waves, I knew I had to do it for Joji, for me, for my river.
That river is where I kayak with my daughter. We have become well acquainted with the ecosystem’s tender beauty and contradictory use as a motorboat speedway, dam feeder, and where some folks throw crap over the edge of the embankment in an out-of-sight-out-of-mind deception. We river paddlers know the truth: That garbage just lodged against a tree or bush, or got caught in a nest.
The show had “movers”, singers, a comedian, musicians, and poets. The poem I wrote and read was about paddling along the river, seeing, thinking, imagining, and mourning. The poem is a prayer for nature to lift us up in the face of tragic stupidity. It’s epic.
Blink
Balance carefully
Transfer weight
Shift rump, ballast of self, of body
Feet first from
worn wood
into the hull
Then
I am floating above the soft muck,
sitting aloft
from the bits of fiberglass flaked
off motorized craft,
swollen cigarette butts
…then a can floats by
Paddle Paddle,
raise eyes,
to the untouched today-sky
Paddle Paddle
I hug close to the trees,
is that a blanket?
There’s a blossom,
thorns,
berries,
beer bottles
broken glass
birds…
Black-necked geese
gather
and feed
in the shadows
of graffitied cement
and
rusted girders:
once shiny in the depression times,
trading ore
for
food on the table
lives lived longer
stronger
than starving in a shack
Paddle, Paddle
And paddle some more until
I pass under wires stretched
From metal tree to metal tree,
to the wide shallows at the
carved and curved bend
above the dam with
man-crafted fish-ladders
where a huge block tower
towers
concrete
jutting
and jagged just below the surface
Don’t get too close!
it can scrape
can cut and cave in
the thin protection
between me
and the invasion
of water…
Or worse.
I want to move on,
but am drawn:
eyes down,
the clouds below me…
until the underneath comes up,
it looks about the same,
but is it?
Is there a
not-right color?
Peering pulls my
scuba-diving mind
down
where the ticking little bubbles are muffled
slow, sleepy, tendrils trail out from
not quite closed enough pipes
not quite thick enough walls
not quite secure enough seals
to contain
the creeping little crushed atoms,
tiny broken neutrons
bits of matter,
and the by-product of
smashed oblivion
hurtled,
hurting,
reacting, reactor
where between donuts and coffee
the universe’s guts exploded with sickening
power,
to turn turbines
and make magic
for plugs, plasma screens, popcorn poppers
Blink…
The crazy monster mushroom
balloons and sizzles itself,
screams of people’s skin on fire,
earth and spires
shudder and blow back
tons of should-be-here
but isn’t anymore
and the new-other
replaces it
Encases it
Erases
the life and health and the normal,
It hangs around in dirt and water
It goes into mouths and mommies
And brains and babies,
and it’s not supposed to do that,
not supposed to make
illness that eats and gobbles up
gaining ground
grinding cells,
growing toxic tumors that no one can
really say are from
Good old Yankee
Good old boy
Good money
Good God!
Of course it is!
Blink…
Paddle paddle
please help stop this rattle rattle
in my heart
send me a blue heron
to whisk away the barren
horrible truth
on this sunny day