Poems by Diane Ray
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Accidental Garden
Cortes Island, BC, Canada
by Diane Ray
From Canary Spring 2020
Diane is a native New Yorker living amidst pine and birch on a hill overlooking Green Lake in Seattle, the 50,000-year-old glacial lake fed by rain, storm run-off, and the Ceder and Tolt River Watersheds.
Walking
the scallop
of a loamy bay
I spy
a blackened
giant
portly
and casual
in death
lolling about
like a logging
whale
barnacled
by
moss
then startle
at
the mini-
garden
--wild greens
and buttercup
off-handedly
planted by
wing and wind
the grains of their
chances having
touched down
in the dead
cedar’s
belly
a kitchen
of furry
cambrium
four feet
off
earth
where
one wee
woods
does as
forests
do
hosting
orphan
and immigrant
no
questions
asked.
© Diane Ray
Dancing the Corona Do Si Do
by Diane Ray
From Canary Spring 2021
My beloved pockets his portion of elevated risk,
of which I hold two scoops. Blithe moments require
a choir of all our cells singing from the balcony
of our lives: Que Sera Sera. Paul, my hour-long
early morning meditator, skates clean strokes between
compartments of his life. I clench my teeth to mentally
ensnare my grit, clamp shut my eyes, and beam away
my what if’s into far off clutches of a cosmic black hole,
depositing all my imagination’s capital, where, surely
not even my mental bungie cord has the tensile strength
to reel back in anxieties interred in surreal density, buying
me a sec of equanimity, enough, anyway, to spark my
enthusiasm for long walks in the real unreal of now-Seattle,
dancing our socially anti-social do si do with all comers
of our species who sometimes thank and sometimes preempt
us, veering to circle round, what with anyone a potential
Typhoid Mary. We toss our hello’s at least six feet, giving
one another the odd life saver of all-in-this-togetherness in
our separateness. How I envy the cotillions of cherry blossoms
congregating in their wishbone branches, the robin shopping
without a mask in my neighbor’s hedge, the snow-capped
Olympics shoulder to shoulder, sharing a cape of clouds.
© Diane Ray
Dear Southern California Folks:
by Diane Ray
From Canary Spring 2019
Hi there! We are the Canisters, your seventy-three new neighbors moving in just yards away from San Onofre State Beach. A photographer could capture our new digs, a child building a sand castle, and a surfer all in one frame. We’d love to have you over, but we know you wouldn’t wish to get stung by the pesky swarm of gamma and beta rays that just won’t leave us be. So that you can get to know us a little, here’s our friendly introduction: we are nuclear waste canisters from the shuttered plant at San Onofre, eighteen feet long and thin skinned, resembling giant coke cans. Each of us is chock full of pez-like pellets of uranium, one hundred thousand pounds equal to one Chernobyl accident. One by one we are being lowered into our retirement condo, a concrete vault with a ten-year warranty like swiss cheese, with a hole cut out for future leaks, but we have to go somewhere. Our new apartment is custom made out of metal-lined concrete, a trendy silo for our high level nuclear load, sunk into a fragile bluff, near an active earthquake fault, in a tsunami zone, about a hundred feet from shore, and already getting its bottom sloshed now and then, skimming an aquifer, the trifecta of water, salt, and radioactivity not your average day at the beach, but the NRC assures us there isn’t enough moisture here for concern. Corrosion shmozen!
We do have to admit it, though, since our move began at the end of January? Well, it hasn’t gone like clockwork. The fifth one of us in line to be loaded and locked showed up with a fallen off bolt used to circulate cooling helium, and we can’t be sure if the first four of us have a crucial screw loose, too, which made the local activists really mad. But they get mad a lot. A bunch of hot heads, if you ask us. All in a dither to begin with about the thickness of our 5/8” walls compared to our 10-19.75” thick-wall cousins, the Casks, used in Europe and Japan, which they claim is why we still have Tokyo, the big shot Sumo casks having remained standing sentinel throughout Fukushima. We admit it, in a perfect world, it could be better if we weren’t so shy and could be inspected and fixed like our bolder cousins if we sprung a radiation leak, but we are who we are, and we cost you so much less, it’s worth it, right? Our maker, Holtec, assures you we’ll be good neighbors. So does the NRC.
By the way, we love imagining your lives amidst all that bougainvillea and frangipani just six miles up the strand in San Clemente-- sounds like a great place, with your teens able to catch a wave en route to school, your newly arrival millennials with spiffy, high tech jobs, and all your blissed-out retirees. What humans wouldn’t wish to live here and in the fifty surrounding miles that could be affected if we,…well, let’s not go there.
Yeah, ok, it’s true, two of the welcome workers loading us nearly dropped one of us eighteen feet in August, dangling by ¼ of an inch for about an hour. So embarrassing! The utility and the NRC tried to keep it secret, but then that safety worker dude had to go blowing off his mouth: I may not have a job tomorrow for what I am about to say, but that’s fine, ‘cause I made a promise to my daughter….There were gross errors. ….That’s a bad day. And you haven’t heard about it. And that’s not right. He said this was the second such almost here, the other having happened just the month before: Public safety should be first and it is not. Behind the gate, it is not.Meanwhile, we are just trying to be good sports. That environmental engineer, the former Presidential nuclear advisor guy? Real pushy, if you ask us, getting together with colleagues at UCSD to look at the basic physics of how bad is bad. Made some wild sounding claims that we could have hit the concrete like over two sticks of dynamite, and that thousands of you humans would have had to skedaddle fast. Not that your government provides your communities any radiation monitors, emergency or evacuation plans. And besides, your President Trump just propped up that toxicologist in early October at the EPA with breaking news: A little radiation is good for you!
beyondnuclearinternational.org/2018/12/16/the-mad-plan-to-store-nuclear-waste-on-the-beach/
© Diane Ray