December 21, 2016

The volcanic eruption of 1912 in Katmai was the largest of the twentieth century.

In these months of dark coming from all sides,

an election gone haywire with four years of insanity rising,

as we dance our crazy, crazy, really, everything coming from homo sapiens,

nothing we’re doing or have done or want makes any sense,

I am reeling with wanting some sense,

so I pass on a solstice skate party, on a holiday literary party,

and go alone to a geology lecture.

The scientist begins with history and I am restless:

I do not want to hear human dramas interpret the landscape.

I want rock-hard truth: the kind ancient stone holds:

I want to revel in the ground that carries a story infinitely older than us.

Older than greed, anger, hate. Older than insanity.

Finally the story moves beyond us, through botanists at the volcanic eruption.

And I don’t care about their journey’s travails, slim rations, blistered feet.

I care about the plants they found, or didn’t.

The fumaroles. The ignimbrite flow. Pyroclastic material.

Airfall: the material that arrived by air, burst skyward from the eruption.

Measure the depth of airfall. Measure the depth of ignimbrite.

Determine the source of eruption. Not the mountain with three peaks gone.

It is that mound, on the Mars plain. Novarupta. New.

The eruption shrouded Alaska, British Columbia.

Its acid ate away bedsheets hanging to dry in Seattle.

The ash dropped global temperatures one degree for a full year.

A power, a force so great and out of human control.

I settle in my seat.