POEMS for LENT • PLUME

"Plume" by Troy's Work Table.

Sidewalk chalk wash, sidewalk chalk, chalk pastels, and charcoal pencil on 12" x 12" concrete board.

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"For years / it may be locked / in the matrix / of silt and sand / like a photo- / graphic image" and "this beautiful / movement / fanning / between interstices / feathering / void to void" —from "Plume" by Kathleen Flenniken, as found in Plume

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I am constantly amazed that as a species we think we can control and contain things. We think we can control and contain the divine that is breathed into our clay vessels. We think we can control and contain politics and culture. And in "Plume," as in the real world, we think we can control and contain nuclear waste.

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Yet we can control and contain nothing. Even ourselves most of the time.

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In "Plume," Kathleen Flenniken adopts a column for the shape of poem. Like in Komunyakaa’s “The Towers,” the form is important to the structure of the poem. Unlike the majority of poems in Carson's Red Doc>, Flenniken handles the form well. Her hand is present and visible in the line breaks, which lend the poem a movement similar to the what the words of the poems themselves capture.

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The poems of Plume, as a collection, are both a love song and an elegy to the people and places (and primarily the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and the Tri-Cities) of the Atomic Age. These poems are personal, with Flenniken's father working at Hanford and then, later, Flenniken herself.

But "Plume" is the poem that universalizes the collection for me. It conveys the poison that we have planted in the earth. It deals in half-lives and longevities that are difficult for me to imagine.

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"Plume" is a matter of scale.

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"Plume" is a matter of structure, and that all structure will fail and decay.

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May God have mercy upon our souls.