the arms race
below oklo
Press your ear against this fossilized nautilus
to hear the hum of a natural reactor.
Below and before the colonial mines, before
the bombs, the fallout, and the shelters,
there was a buried decanter of light, a lair
of drakaina, a chasm where a granular fuzz
of uranium crystals tickled the feet of eyeless
naiads, their silver skin dipped in a balm
of stray ions. These nymphs bathed
in superheated cisterns of trapped water.
They fed on plumes of heat produced
by buried suns, whose pungent rays pickled
the tissues of the earth. They drank
the dew of Styx from crystal goblets.
Ancient reactor coolant pacified
the shrieks of stillborn stars, whose songs cut
through the earth with wild notes, each burst
of fission sizzling like a sunken lantern
plunging into the maw of an subsea trench.
The naiadsâ infernal sauna predates us;
this Pandoraâs box unlocked itself. Before
our earliest ancestors first tread through
southern savannahs, a restless trove
of nuclear fuel pulsed in this georeactor,
each Precambrian throb a spasm of ore,
a radionuclear twitch eager to spill forth.
Neodymium dissolves in this aching heat.
Ruthenium unravels in this raving deep,
decay particles caught in sandstone,
clay, and granite. Thermal neutrons
sunder the surrounding umber stone
of these hothouse catacombs.
Carcinogenic steam from hellish
bathhouses permeates troughs
of liquid heat, where even molecules boil,
where even nuclei evaporate.
In the naiadsâ company, a necromancer
charms the cavernâs dead back to life.
Calcified skeletons crack open their
stratified tombs to dance
in the antechamber of Earthâs
first critical mass.
Nature was never innocent, trapping hymns
within black crystals, testing her flesh
in water-woven trenches, breeding grounds
for her tectonic fauna: uraninite, pitchblende,
thorianite, pegmatite, betafite, lost volumes
from a mineralogical apocrypha.
The demise of our species
is written in these stones.
There was a revelation when the mines opened,
though the miracle was merely material.
Plunderers dove into the earth
for the spoils of energy. And human life
prepared itself for omnicide,
bathing in the waters of its doom.
radioactivity
for Marie SkĹodowska Curie
Relentless curiosity compelled you to plunge
your hands into elemental embodiments
of chaotic decay, to tinker with glinting flasks
of vicious species of dust.
If young Joan of Arc spoke with god, and was burned
for their exchanges, then which gods communed with you
and set your bones ablaze, left you delirious
from necrotic marrow?
For how many hours, O bright priestess
of Prometheus, did you bear bundles
of test tubes, slid into the pockets
of your lab coats, each glass vial alight
with flameless fire, leaving your c...