WEBVTT

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It's the last poem.

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It's called "Workmen
Photographed

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Inside the Reactor."

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And again, it's the reactor at
Chernobyl, which somehow I've

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become obsessed with, I guess.

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Again, the cleanup
there is going

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to take a couple
of hundred years.

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And so that's mentioned
there kind of obliquely.

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There are a couple of other
things I should tell you about.

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There's this
incredibly beautiful,

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probably the most beautiful
courtyard in all of Spain,

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in Salamanca, called The
Convent of Las Dueñas.

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And it was built by a very, very
wealthy Golden Age contessa who

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decided, like they
often did then too,

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it would be a nice
gesture to create

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a holy order, which she did.

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And she built the place
for it and then realized

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that it was so beautiful
that the nuns weren't

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thinking about the afterlife.

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So she had the
courtyard decorated

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with scenes from Dante's
Inferno, and it's there,

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and they're quite remarkable.

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They look a little bit like
all the capitals and pillars,

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sort of look like those
Gustave Doré decorations.

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And there's also a
reference to a rem, which is

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a unit for measuring radiation.

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"Workmen Photographed
Inside the Reactor."

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"It passes, you'll
remember, through lead.

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Passes through the protective
suits that don't protect,

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passes every template,
roil of hardened magma,

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each jutting braincase
of Medusan electric wire.

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Each goggle, each mask,
each sandbag flung

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by helicopter seven years
ago, the pilot soon dead.

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Passes through the camera of
Victoria Ivleva as her flash

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finds the shades in Circle
IV, Circle V, Circle VII.

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Their bone-white suits.

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A single ray of
sunlight slithering down

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the cracked reactor wall.

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200 rems per man per month.

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Passes through the window panes
of the empty concrete high-rise

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40 miles away, the single
plastic eye and nylon lashes

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of a doll on a closet floor.

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Each thought is a
rem, Ivleva says.

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Each thought closer
to the moment.

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The spiral more tightly wound.

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The communications
satellite exhausts its fuel.

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The flawless image of a
soccer game in Sao Paulo

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jumpcutting to a gray
screen's static hiss.

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The wreckage alchemist
to shooting stars.

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Scrap metal littering
Australian deserts.

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Each thought coiled
more tightly.

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You and I beneath
the cafe awning,

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the morning of the news reports,
the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca.

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All morning the courtyard of
The Convent of Las Dueñas,

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capitals sprouting demons,
horned, dismembered heads,

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sinners faces laddering the
columns in a double helix

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of damnation.

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Cautionary images
for wealthy nuns

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of a golden age,
and marble Dante,

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skullcap at the fountain
reading from the Commedia.

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The clouds at the
paper pulsing westward,

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each thought, each
thought, the spiral

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tightening to the plastic
tube, ringing my father's neck.

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Angina pectoris, emphysema,
his jittery breathing

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in the room beyond.

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The oxygen machine,
umbilical hum, and shudder,

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he has 10 days to live.

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Point where the
circle disappears.

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The bedroom I had as a child.

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Hum and shudder.

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I stand with the others outside
the yawning gate, chain-link,

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and barbed wire.

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The white plastic suits swing
from meat hooks in a hallway.

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Step in, zip up.

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The masks, the skull
caps, the rubber gloves

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reaching up to the elbows,
the pikes, the radiometers.

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One last breath, last glance at
the trees, down the staircase

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to the pit.

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Each thought, the pike before
me stabbing at the gloom."

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Thanks.

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[APPLAUSE]

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