lights out a man so coated in blood
I had no idea who PA System: Fire.
Fire. Fire. taste and smell of fuel gas
fire from derrick leg to leg out the starboard
window “they’re all gone” methane air....
500 m.) an egret mud-covered on starboard deck
and that pyre the dead the very air we breathe
A collage of testimony, the forms in “Blowout” speak to the disorientation and chaos of the experience. Dunham combines lyrical language with snippets of reportage, much of it incomplete, a method that reflects the inadequacy of the venture and its terrifying consequences.
Alongside the testimony and interviews of others who failed to see, the poet enacts her own difficulty of seeing, understanding, accepting, forgiving, and mourning. There is an absence of self-righteousness here, necessary in a collection that struggles to assess unfathomable damage. Take the final section of “Elegy for the Eleven.” Here, Dunham strives to conjure prayer, pity, and comfort for the “loved ones” of those who died in the spill, only to turn on them, in a gesture worthy of the Hebrew Testament:
their souls shake off
this planet’s weight....
This is what I should say.
But in June, the hole
still spilling itself into
the Gulf, as lilies
startle my garden pink
and gold, I put faith
in what I know best.
Hate—after all
these years, you owe me
this much, at least—
let the oilmen drown....
Let
them expire beneath
the pewtered bell,
its terrible weight.
Dunham’s words are rather like that oil-freighted pelican, and although she is not “tarped mute,” she is agonizingly aware that her words can change none of what happened. Yet no reader who opens Cold Pastoral will be able to forget what she has seen. The Hebrew word for active memory is “Zakhor.” Such memory requires action to strengthen the power and resilience of remembrance. The energy implicit in “Zakhor” is a commandment, and its meaning is at the heart of both of these urgent collections.