1.
He: Is it night already?
She: No.
He: Did our house fall down?
She: What happened?
He: Is it you?
2.
He: Yes.
She: Why should I believe you?
He: Doesnât geology put us in our place?
*
He: We appeared in the age of fission:
vaporized bodies, ionized dragonflies, shadows printed on stone.
She: Japanese cities burned in my dreams.
I saw the newsreels in class
decades laterâ
He: Weâre back here on the Palisades cliffsâstaring at Manhattanâ
remember when the Sauternes was liquid gold?
3.
She: In the beginning there were alpha particles and gamma rays.
We always see daylight through the kitchen window near dusk
We canât forget how dusk turns the hydrangea deep blue.
We canât forget the glowing dioxin sunâthe no-gaze,
morning bright blue agent-orange skyâeven nowâafter all.
4.
He: Godard called Hiroshima mon amour Faulkner plus Stravinskyâ
She: Remember: at the AngelikaâSeptember smell of light rain
warm sidewalks shop awnings late summerâ
He: The noren curtains opened, the noren curtains closed.
We stared at kanji, birds, sketches of roofs, a tree
the lovers walked through the curtains either way
time shifted like breeze through eye sockets
She: They said goodbye and the noren curtains opened
and the past was a burning city
seen in silence, just images on screens.
Lui: What did Hiroshima mean to you?
Elle: The end of the war, fear and terror that it could happen to us,
then indifferenceâastonishment that they dare do itâ
then it became an unknown fearâ
5.
She: Weâre standingâ
on an underground channel of molten rock
that fed volcanic eruptions 200 million years ago.
Earth = axis = spinning = two selvesâswerveâpossibility
He: Take Pan, all day weâve played around with him.
She: Here we areâlying on Gaea.
He: Top of a volcanoâmolten basalt cooled and hardened
weâre on the sill still, and rock is never stillâ
She: The sillâs eastern edge = Palisades cliffs, one version of home.
6.
He: Unified land massâPangeaâEarth as wholeâ
She: Pan and Gaea = bridging self with other.
7.
He: Remember the blizzard of lettersâ
commas, question marks, dashes, words cut in half
on the subway walls at 4thâafter we talked out the movie
you saidâone view of the post-war:
a burger and a shake, a jukebox and a neon rainbow on the wall.
8.
He: If you said it was molten rock, I believed you.
If you said the molten rock was once underground
and created volcanic eruptions 200 million years ago,
I believed you.
If you said the eruptions covered 4 million square miles with
basalt lava, I didnât flinch.
And if the lava blasted gales of carbon dioxide and sulfur into the atmosphere,
I got the general idea.
I got the general idea that there were long volcanic winters after and afterâ
like sci-fi on a screen in a movie house at the beginning of time
when the reception was perfect.
She: Listen to Gaea: âWe broke apartâ200 million years agoâend of Triassicâ
magma rose from deeper in the earth
intruded into the sandstones and shales, then the molten rock spread, cooled, hardened,
thenâI was a sill overlaying softer rockâand the softer rock eroded.â
9.
He: The look of ionized skin of the two lovers in bed
âthe caressing, the trick of the camera
âirradiated light: those oboes and violinsâ
and the skeletal flutesâsame as Night and Fogâ
Lui: You saw nothing.
Elle: I saw everything.
Elle: How could I have not seen it?
Lui: You saw nothing in Hiroshima.
10.
She: Can you imagine the perfect eruptions until the clouds dissolvedâ
and the ocean became acidic like a white-out gale and
the atmosphere heated up until most of life on Earth
was impossible?
Did you get the picture of T...