Girdled in glass, suspended in water
protist, the very first, not plant, nor animal, nor fungus nor bacterium,
diatoms fix carbon, give us 30 percent of the air we breathe
synthesize sunlight to sugar, food for the whole web of us.
Here it says diatoms decrease in nutrient-depleted environments.
Yet here it says, new species of diatoms are thriving in the highly radioactive cooling ponds of nuclear power plants. Word from Russia, from Ukraine, from Japan. Likely true everywhere – diatoms are world citizens, have not forgotten we live on one earth, one watery planet.
From grandmother to mother, mother to daughter, through innumerable generations,
diatoms carry cesium-137, a radioisotope created only in nuclear explosions.
Something to do with living in a glass house.
Something like lyrebirds.
Once caged as a flutist’s companion, a wild lyrebird learned a flute repertoire. When released, the lyrebird sang of that harrowed time – which others took up and passed on – such opaline notes that wild lyrebirds still flute that bird’s divided life.
A surprise mitosis – a sudden –
a moment, not out of body but in
no body at all
– a life divides into before and after, unequal portions –
The river tells Sarah, unsafe and afraid for her children on Prairie Island,
Yes, tritium permeates everything here
Speak for us
It will be ok. Everything will be ok.
/we say, on a calm day, the water is glass
She hears the diatoms in the river, the crystalline diatoms ringing.
After the sudden / the sudden after
furrows the daughter cells of oneself
/something of one forever out of reach
/something of one forever girdled to that sudden
and nothing is not complexified
A sudden – a detonation
microflints sparked into flame
Imagine diatoms ruptured, like the fish burst in the Pacific Proving Grounds – violent pressures, vacuums, glittering vapor falling up, out, on, in
Instead of leaving bones, a diatom leaves glass
glass spun with potassium,
glass architecture embellished with pilasters, spires
and, since 1945, man-made radiation
Maybe a smaller view: a woman murmurs to the ailing child, knowing there’s little she can do but love: It’s ok, it will be ok
Here it says diatoms decrease in nutrient-depleted environments,
yet in the cooling ponds of nuclear power plants, among the spent fuel rods, hot and heating, hot and altering,
new species of diatoms thrive –
I’m not a scientist, surely I am mistranslating these studies, this measure of words:
the new diatoms have wider and longer valve faces
more area with which to receive and give, I think,
but what do I know, a poet, chasing mercury beads from broken sense
no daughters in me
to be a wild bird with a river repertoire
I do know we all have been needing more to subsist in less, and
new forms of diatoms prevail in extreme radioactive environments
Perhaps they are preparing to nurse the ocean
after a sudden –
Pacific mothers hum, it’s ok, it will be ok
—
Books by Su Love include Weight of Light, nominated for the Pushcart Editors’ Book Prize, and Buddha, Proof, a Minnesota Book Award finalist. Su’s sixth book concerns legacies of nuclear power in Minnesota and is supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and St. Croix Watershed Research Station. Su has been a visiting writer at several colleges, universities and organizations including Salmon Literary Centre, Ireland, and American Space Madrid/Instituto Internacional. sulove.org.
