Plutonium 239

Plutonium 239

Plutonium 239

Figures in the landscape appear to burn. A fringe
of cinders: yellow dust, funerary ash covering
the ground – Varanasi, Dasaswamedh. Saddhu
in a burning ghat. And the canticle: place of
dead reckoning. Signs written in concrete, a blind
one-eyed skull and the half-god half-corpse
that fits it, fucking down into the underside of a
guilty conscience, to measure degrees of con-
tamination. An underground reservoir, dug out
by the old whitebellied diviner pumping brine
from limestone sinkholes, resists the applied
method. Saddhu perched on a heap of rubbish
exhaling long plumes of smoke. The camera’s
analogue eye like a mind passing and
observing – atoms, nomenclature, intellect –
how can it be removed? If the earth were as
flat as it seems, a photograph
dragging down at the edges – belongs to another
history: a mathematical error addressed in
manufactured desert-language, like a too-
rational and precise stupidity, uncorrectable
as a dog or man who refuses labour. Saddhu
in a contortionist’s box: television vistas,
satellites, remote emanations telling of contracted
future memory in solitary confinement. A band
of night shows red above the Judas-hole – they are
counting down, digit by available digit.
Smoke settles on the eye’s inner rim; attendant
fingers brush ash from ashtrays into a plastic bag.
At the other end of the demarcation line
one more salvage operation is about to begin.