Today's report on the troubled Fukushima reactors shows the complications of last-ditch solutions. Now the saltwater being poured on the fuel rods is leaving behind salt, tons of it....
Salt
A string suspended in seawater, weighted by a nail. The metal’s not important, though its shine seems to make visible the critical elements. Time. The startling sedimentation of gray or white crystals. Soul pulled from a body in which it had dissolved, precipitate still infused with the taste of the closed inner sea. A dead white snow on the fields after the flood. It can’t be rinsed away, this paradoxical beauty, poison and purifier, soil barren, or raked and licked. At the reactor farm after the inundation, spent, suspended fuel rods grow crystalline as seawater sizzles off. Fifty tons of salt fills the interiors, liquid long since lost, rupturing the rods’ zirconium cladding, protective skin that holds in hot iodine gas. The exhale reaches Tokyo (don’t drink water from the tap ) and in Beijing there’s a run on Morton’s, or the umbrella’d girl’s equivalent. Iodine talisman to displace the fear. We listen for explosions, sounds indicating the movement of particles, Izanagi’s spear stirring the salt water once again, extracting shadow islands, rinsing off traces of the Kingdom of the Lost. For now, the invisible remains invisible, but for the dulling sheen of dried brine on the skin, a communion exchanged by touch and breath, shared like rice, like dread.
3/23
Image by Okinawa soba, via Flickr.
