A tendency to survive after disaster
BY ÉIREANN LORSUNG
April 26, 1986; March 11, 2011
Cherry trees are growing up through the house.
This morning we found another slug climbing the kitchen wall.
I’m going to tell you once:
the day you leave you’d better
do it all. No coming back.
No carloads.
Get your suitcase
and get out.
Within thirty miles of the disaster site animals’ bodies are useless.
At first embryos just dissolved. Being in reverse.
We went back to cells, back to what it was safe to eat.
The cherry tree
through
the front window is a sign
that things go on.
Counting roentgens
we made
our way through sumac,
elk droppings.
If you’ve left laundry on the line, don’t go back; it’s raining now.
I’m lying on the bed and preserving the shape of your body
even though your body isn’t there.
I’m stroking the indent with one most gentle finger.
Rationing this too.
The blankets are glowing. The sheets in the closet are alive.
Saplings grow through things that soften.
I can feel the small trees starting in my abdomen.
Beloved you have forgotten one shoe here in the room.
You started
down the road
before me—
I can still see the shape
of your back—our house
and our cherry
trees crying out
for the living,
mattresses
decaying, my
papers floating
out the door
beyond you the ashes
of another city—
The veil of dust is attached to almost everything
and someone is beginning the new song,
the one we sang that day, in the dark, when even the notes were visible,
the one that begins in fire and ends with orchards growing
in our house—
Nuclear Geography
BY ÉIREANN LORSUNG
Inland counties, arriving
on the last train I saw cooling towers.
Outline of a coal plant’s a nuclear
plant where I come from.
West Midlands, Water Orton,
where white birch stand in succession.
I saw your bright orange coat.
Your work pants striped with reflective tape.
Repetitive unburnished roofs
of your houses and your council estate
flats. All through the Midlands
men’s bodies pile up in their brightness.
Telephone poles, high-tension electric
towers, columns supporting overpasses
in the middle of nowhere a city
on a hill. I saw the factory wall
literally falling in as the train sped
past, and people standing in line
for smelting.
The gas frames rise
and the arched train bridges
follow along.
None of your business,
none of your business.
—forsythia
Outside the car
the silence of
large machines
—oxeye daisy
—when women begin
to miscarry systemically
prescribe the knotted
compound heads of tansy,
tell them not to worry,
distribute government
pamphlets, issue
plastic bottles of water,
let the matter rest.
When syntax falls ill,
let poems say nothing.
Pass samizdat on milk
cartons. Believe or don’t
believe in a landscape that keeps
passing, passing.
Across the aisle, two
men debate loudly
in a language
I don’t speak. A pair
of British Transport
Police arrest
all Chinese nationals.
The train is emptier.
The age
of deportation begins
with a whisper.
Allotments
on a hill.
Onions in the allotments,
huts, shacks, hidey-holes, a tree
house, a gamekeeper’s lodge,
places in the woods:
now the woods
growing up in them.
Midlands hawthorn
in a shelled-out room.
This is the last
train departing
for Coventry.
Variegated ivy pushing
through tile in our
last rented house.
—a moss, what was it
called, did you know?
A fine misting rain starts
and the steeple of a church
blurs in the near distance—
the land
smells like burning
rubber—
First question always a question
of remainder: remnant.
Meaning, who stays?
Oblique and perfect
curve. The canal.
—We did it perfectly
we kept all the original features
the ear
of the other is
pressed to the door
in houses
where breakdown
seems inevitable
go
into fields
gather
what is left
although it will
not save us
go
underground
to the unnamed
garden
to the paperless
hidden ones
—Ribes rubrum
Ribes nigrum
Ribes uva-crispa
—Saxifraga rosacea
a glandular hair
appearance of blowflies
inside buildings
erect
inflorescence
consumption
of seaweed is in some
places believed
to be an antidote
to doses
as strong as 300
kJ/hr
tell
one another
stories
Meanwhile observatories and
their geodesic domes passing.
The ewe sheep
and the lambs lying all over
a field, the brightness
of the land coming
from the land, under the gray
sky. One whiteness
the wool, one limestone
cuts in earth show
on a far hill.
How many hundreds
of years will we wait
to cultivate these places
again?
—Drosophilia melanogaster
In the evening there is still
a glow at certain angles.
Longboat on sandbar.
A field now of black
and brown cows slumping,
green-tagged ears.
Gray face
of an ewe next to a fallen
tree. Where sun
comes, the fields are chartreuse.
This is something to remember.
As they remove visas
from the passport books and the books
change color. Even after
the desolation
of the earth. We rode
into this sunlight,
we turned toward it.
A mountain, almost
not there in the distance.
It was like I dreamt it.
They are burning tires now,
near the pink house.
—Urtica dioica L.
—Rumex acetosa L.
—in about 1796
the pollen
nearly always defective
a characteristic apple
smell
when crushed
when discovered
(by illiterates by
mothers?)
finally
by Sir H—
L—, name-grantor,
it had been in use
in kitchen
gardens
for centuries
Houses on the hill
near Bristol Temple
Meads Station, pink
white cream royal blue red
yellow pale purple.
Fence and wall
painted with paint engineered
to prevent human
hands from gripping.
Where a back wall was, the torched
interior. Much more often
a blue house, a pale
bright blue house, here.
Evidence of the human.
Even in an unpruned
apple orchard near an oxbow
bend.
—the introduction of these
elements to, the imposition of these
elements upon
—a human body
—the properties of such elements
—a suitable test population
results in
nausea hair
loss diarrhea
vomiting
damage to bone
marrow
and central
nervous system
look
behind you
don’t give out
your name
—bone-set
—yarrow
Near Yatton a row of tiny
houses: lace and scallops.
Grandmother
houses of the early twentieth
century. Seashell
houses.
A man in the carriage
says the machine et it
and means it.
Our telephones pick
up our tone. Satellites
track the train.
He eats the entire
apple, except the stem.
Seeds are precious.
Holds out a package of old
biscuits and tea.
A doll-faced
balding child regards
the scene. Wind dusts
a factory’s empty
columns. Birds
can’t steer. Thirty or so
caravans huddle in the lee.
The Somerset Heritage
Center now a metal
frame. For several miles, hills
of ore or gravel. Sandbags
deserted in rail ditch.
They are burning
something nearer, now.
The air is all afresh with it.
The end of history
BY ÉIREANN LORSUNG
To define force—it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.
SIMONE WEIL
The general called it my other heart.
The chemist, a soft, silvery-white element.
The physicist wrote, a change in current generates a force.
Baptized on auction block,
the theory receives Communion
6,600 feet above Nagasaki.
A thread clung to my
dark clothes, a little thread.
It would not let go.
In newspapers it was unlinked
from everything around it:
technological perfection, descending.
It is not unlinked from me.
On whom was made no such experiment.
Its where constituent of its what.
In an all-white space, almost
no oxygen around that thread;
almost no language left at all.
