The Fire which can never be put out;
the water which can never be cleaned…
What would it cost to have a revolving, traveling,
THEATER OF THE NEW go around and around
the Wallowas and show this film, and others like it,
(ARID LANDS, IF YOU LOVE THIS PLANET), at
every Library, every School, in every Grange, around
from Hanford, around the Imnaha and the Snake,
over McCall to Twin Falls, down the Salmon and
Lewiston and back down the great Columbia? And
do so, over and over again, until people finally,
unequivocally, say “no?” Say “no” to Plutonium,
the element of Hell. It took but 5 kilograms for
Oppenheimer’s bomb to level NAGASAKI.
The reactor with the graphite core Enrico Fermi
designed is still there. Yet it takes but one microgram
– 1,000,000 of a gram, free in the atmosphere
and entering the lungs — to kill a human being.
Call this science? “I am become death, the
destroyer of worlds.” This is the legacy which
surrounds the magnificent heart-center jewel
of the Wallowas, “Great Land of Winding Waters,’
threatened now, on all its sides.
How confused the ways
we wander once truth is lost,
How unnecessary the wars,
how meaningless, the waste.
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
I shudder in fear at this inversion of meaning,
of culture, when we no longer serve anything
outside of ourselves, but use all that we touch
to serve ourselves instead. The Muse looks down
on this abuse of talent, where the next great
performance becomes merely the next opportunity
for self-promotion. That is why the sound of even
the greatest violin cracks before getting off the
stage, playing merely to ourselves, alone, in halls
surrounded by mirrors, always without echo,
without meaning. So we mine the great aquifers
of our collective cultural past, that is:—until
the sparkling streams of youth go dry.
THE CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE “How does Time
measure the Divine,” asked the Sun.
And the Moon said, “In rounds of 4,
circling around 3’s.”