When the beasts scurry from the
sacred script — small and furry
creatures, soft brown pelts plush against
cooled lava. The depth of the cracks
in the dark rock extends eons.
So does the mass, which is
wrinkled and strange. It took people
to ever discover it, and to create it, though
if people had not found it, would it
exist? What exists? What exists? What
exists...we march on.
But if we were primitive, we would
crawl on our bellies like baby seals and we
would never know the mass exists, if only for
the split daisies in the yard, beautiful to us
in the green, magnified like the eye
of a cow. Little clusters of pale and
yellow dot mine now, saying
to come near. There is no sign saying
keep off the grass; there are only parchment
manuscripts written in shorthand, a vivid painting of
the Virgin Mary Travers bestowed upon the forty-third page
of chapter twenty-four. Her dress is the same
colour as the sky on spring mornings.
An airstream dream, powder-blue
and beautiful, streaks across the sky,
         blowing awry a girl’s skirt. She has never known
the cinema show, since they don’t
exist anymore, so she can’t think of herself
as Marilyn Monroe. She knows, though, that
there is a mass in Chernobyl. There is
no mass on Three Mile Island, which is just visible
over the horizon line. New smoke rises from
the cooling towers, hazy in the golden
breeze of sunset, which whispers of “Expecting
to Fly.” Men in paleplastic jumpsuits
waddle in the distance, with their paleplastic
bags and tousled hair — maybe they look like
forlorn tourists from some new star system,
peaceful or not, or maybe they resemble
overgrown toddlers, forced to suckle from the breast of
         strange loop theory, washed-out,
reliving old memories, sent
home early from the schoolyard
as to not drink bad water. These strange effigies,
so unrecognizable in their familiarity, as if
we have met them in some other life, fester
and thrive within the five-mile radius
of what love is. And love blooms
in accordion patterns from the fresh
soil their boots tread, not yet
decommissioned or deemed
sickly. The radio angels lay
strewn-aside, left to stretch their
wings in the bumblebee snow. The twinkling
star emits a music-box tinkle, rattling across
metallic antennae as mankind crawls, rises to its
toes, and stumbles. And a pretty girl whose
mother told her she regretted
ever letting another person touch
her breaks from tradition, lets
a boy drift to her, and has a baby.
The baby plays with the ash,
         and eats the elephant’s foot.
The baby grows strong like a nuclear reactor
         and lives life on a molecular level:
one step at a time, one step at a time.