It's the last poem.
It's called "Workmen Photographed
Inside the Reactor."
And again, it's the reactor at Chernobyl, which somehow I've
become obsessed with, I guess.
Again, the cleanup there is going
to take a couple of hundred years.
And so that's mentioned there kind of obliquely.
There are a couple of other things I should tell you about.
There's this incredibly beautiful,
probably the most beautiful courtyard in all of Spain,
in Salamanca, called The Convent of Las Dueñas.
And it was built by a very, very wealthy Golden Age contessa who
decided, like they often did then too,
it would be a nice gesture to create
a holy order, which she did.
And she built the place for it and then realized
that it was so beautiful that the nuns weren't
thinking about the afterlife.
So she had the courtyard decorated
with scenes from Dante's Inferno, and it's there,
and they're quite remarkable.
They look a little bit like all the capitals and pillars,
sort of look like those Gustave Doré decorations.
And there's also a reference to a rem, which is
a unit for measuring radiation.
"Workmen Photographed Inside the Reactor."
"It passes, you'll remember, through lead.
Passes through the protective suits that don't protect,
passes every template, roil of hardened magma,
each jutting braincase of Medusan electric wire.
Each goggle, each mask, each sandbag flung
by helicopter seven years ago, the pilot soon dead.
Passes through the camera of Victoria Ivleva as her flash
finds the shades in Circle IV, Circle V, Circle VII.
Their bone-white suits.
A single ray of sunlight slithering down
the cracked reactor wall.
200 rems per man per month.
Passes through the window panes of the empty concrete high-rise
40 miles away, the single plastic eye and nylon lashes
of a doll on a closet floor.
Each thought is a rem, Ivleva says.
Each thought closer to the moment.
The spiral more tightly wound.
The communications satellite exhausts its fuel.
The flawless image of a soccer game in Sao Paulo
jumpcutting to a gray screen's static hiss.
The wreckage alchemist to shooting stars.
Scrap metal littering Australian deserts.
Each thought coiled more tightly.
You and I beneath the cafe awning,
the morning of the news reports, the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca.
All morning the courtyard of The Convent of Las Dueñas,
capitals sprouting demons, horned, dismembered heads,
sinners faces laddering the columns in a double helix
of damnation.
Cautionary images for wealthy nuns
of a golden age, and marble Dante,
skullcap at the fountain reading from the Commedia.
The clouds at the paper pulsing westward,
each thought, each thought, the spiral
tightening to the plastic tube, ringing my father's neck.
Angina pectoris, emphysema, his jittery breathing
in the room beyond.
The oxygen machine, umbilical hum, and shudder,
he has 10 days to live.
Point where the circle disappears.
The bedroom I had as a child.
Hum and shudder.
I stand with the others outside the yawning gate, chain-link,
and barbed wire.
The white plastic suits swing from meat hooks in a hallway.
Step in, zip up.
The masks, the skull caps, the rubber gloves
reaching up to the elbows, the pikes, the radiometers.
One last breath, last glance at the trees, down the staircase
to the pit.
Each thought, the pike before me stabbing at the gloom."
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]