The Fallout

I once spent a day in San Francisco.  I was queasy on the taxi ride in and saw more of the toilet bowl than the shoreline.  Everything was wet and smelled of fish; impossible angles and broken horizons, like a cubist painting brought to life. Too beautiful to live there, too dangerous too.  I left just before the Japan tsunami hit, and on television, at home, I watched as the San Francisco area felt the faintest ripple of waves, a gentle reminder of calamities happening elsewhere.  The story faded and people went on with their lives.  A year later, flotsam from the tsunami started to pile in on the Pacific coast, motorcycles and piers, to lay down on beaches as exhibits for a case never made.  Bulky objects that had to be towed away, with everything to declare. They said: Fukushima still burns. The ocean stubbornly refused to censor what it knew (what we try to bury in words has a way of floating to the surface eventually). Miles and miles and miles, a run-on sentence that, given enough time, lands its point. I was a tourist, but I live here now, in San Francisco and Fukushima.  And when I breathe in your cancer, I exhale it as poetry.