28 December

NUCLEAR RUINS

WORMWOOD

December 28, 2008

Chernobyl is the strangest, the most recent and most clearly preventable of all my ruins, the one with the farthest-reaching and longest-lasting implications, the one which will not simply and slowly sink into the earth which accepts all gifts. Yet Chernobyl is a ruin. I hadn’t quite seen it that way at first, since most of my ruins are peaceful, benign. Chernobyl, after more than two decades, is tending toward tranquility, the reminder that time really does heal all wounds, but it hasn’t reached it yet. Chernobyl still feels haunted, perhaps by so many heroes who lost their lives there, and saved the world.

A Ferris wheel out back of the Palace of Culture and Sport in Pripyat has never been in use, scheduled as it was to open on the First of May, 1986. The earth is taking back a hotel and a swimming pool, as it has perhaps already taken a church I read about but never saw. A school was by far the saddest of these remains, with bookshelves tilting crazily and books piled in heaps. I was momentarily seized with an urge to take a souvenir – there were no signs forbidding it – but I didn’t act on this brief lunacy. The photographs I took are suffused enough with the magnitude of this catastrophe.

Leaving the site of what may be the worst thing my species has ever done, I had to walk through a radiation detector. It was only an instant of terror. The rest of the world that waited for me on the other side was, and still is, a miracle.

HALF-LIVES

August 6, 2001

The wind called Termination blasts and scours

the shell of a ghost-town schoolhouse where children

of farmers and ranchers learned their ABCs before

the government gave these residents of Hanford

thirty days to pack their things and go.

I listen for the padded footfalls of bobcats

stalking sparrows and voles in the cool

shadows of abandoned reactors

that punctuate the bluffs above this surreal stretch

of the Columbia River that plutonium saved.

In the slow but unrelenting current, two mule deer swim

toward the riverbank where a bright red sign

warning Construction Site: No Trespassing

guards the future tombs of nuclear tailings.

A third of the river’s salmon start and finish

their unlikely lives on the gravelly bottom

of these fifty miles of the Hanford Reach,

but the seep of irrigation from the cropland shore

is threatening to erode the stone above their spawning beds.

I linger in plutonium’s slow legacy, half-grateful, half-afraid.