Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse: Poems

The Feeling of the World As a Bounded Whale Is the Mystical

The Feeling of the World As a Bounded Whale Is the Mystical The child affixes one of her little pictures to my refrigerator. She asks, Can you detect the radiation? There is a house, one tree, and grass in dark slashes. A sun shining. Beneath, in her child letters, she has written Chernobyl. At kindergarten they must be having nuclear energy week. One could look at the picture and say everything is in order. No, I say, I cannot see the radiation. The radiation poison, she says, sits inside the apple and the apple looks pretty. Then singsongs, Bury the apple and bury the shovel that buried the apple and put the apple-burier person in a closet forever. We are both thinking Then bury the burier. Both thinking of her picture with no people. The poison sits inside the people and the people still look pretty, she says. Still, she says, sweetly, Away with them. The child is not a flincher, which is why I love to tell her stories: Of the poisonous man who tumbled into the cold sea and turned the sea poignant. His bones glowed in the cold deep like dying coral. His ribcage was a cave for small, lost fish. Flecks of his glowing skin joined with green algae on the sea surface, where, on a boat, his widow choked as she looked down the sun shaft for her husband’s greening body. 23 What is sunlight through seawater most like but the strange green fire that burnt the man? —Who had worked atop a steel hill until a whale— a great green whale—bumped into the continental shelf and the steel hill cracked and its poison leaked out. And the man began to melt . . . What I am jealous of in the child, what I really detest in her is how she nods with kindergarten grace and finality. Primly, into her pinafore, she tucks what I’ve told of the story. On the refrigerator her picture looks so pretty. There is no end to the green or pollen or the feeling of the bees coming. Or of a hill and sky of poison. On fire, the man working on the reactor must have looked wavy— like a man trying to ride a humpback through the fast green sea. Her picture on the refrigerator looks so pretty. When I wake her from her nap I will ask if the dark green slashes are meant to be radiance, not plain grass. " " " 24 The child asks, What can keep me safe? We are riding in the car. She has seatbelt across her lap, her shoulders, her gut. She is little so she has seatbelt across her forehead. It is a long ride, a good time for the plane crash story. She is driving. She feels safer when she drives and this allows me room to gesture expansively about the plane taking off, the plane going down. “No,” he said, defiantly. It was the man who sat in the plane as he drowned. “No,” he said, “No.” Except he said this in his head. Fine, the child interrupts. I will not ride in planes. Wrong, I say. It’s tiresome to repeat the same adages, but that’s what you do with children: For when there was a plague inside the houses, the people slept on the roofs. What was that but sleeping on the whale’s back? And the stars made a whale in the sky and the grass shone so brightly in the starlight that the night had a greenish hue. And with the night whale shining down— He who slept on the roof died on the roof, the child finishes. It was the story of the ballplayer I was trying to tell. Flying rice to earthquake victims and his plane stalled over the sea . . . 25 Before the plane went down the man saw the four corners of his fate: rice paddy where the lethal bulk of the last bag of rice grew grass on his first ballfield moss on the rock where he sat while his son was being born green dial on the control panel— And the man who saw this saw the green whale, the child finishes again. She is curt when she is scared. Why I let a small child drive my car— well, this child knows my feelings on safety. If we only stay careful and awake...