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First we gave the earth our leavings:
coal-water, slag, the greenish milk
of factories washing their iron mouths,
ash settling over the thistle
until each leaf wore industry
Then the smaller refusals—
teeth in hospital sacks,
hair in drain-traps, cattle blood,
the blackened grain of exhausted fields,
names struck from ledgers,
desires we called diseased
because they would not kneel.
We had a word for every exile
and none for the country they made together.
Beneath the landfill, fermentation.
Beneath the cemetery, seepage.
Beneath the sealed drum,
a patient alteration of water.
Nothing vanished.
The soil received our absolutions
without agreeing to them.
Moss climbed the arsenic brick.
Fungi entered treated timber
and translated poison into pale fruit.
At the refinery fence, chicory
lifted blue flowers through petroleum crust.
Even the rats became archivists,
carrying our chemistry in their fat.
We called this resilience.
We meant: continue absorbing us.
At night the estuary worked its dark equation:
mercury in silt, silt in worm,
worm in flounder, flounder in us—
a ladder whose lowest rung
had already entered the blood.
The herons stood among shopping carts
with the patience of instruments
waiting for a reading.
Far offshore, where the continental shelf
gives up its jurisdiction,
our refuse descended:
barrels, trawl-nets, plastic nurdles,
munition casings furred with anemones,
a million bright particles too small
for the old distinction between body and world.
There, pressure corrected our vocabulary.
Not grave. Not trench.
Not sleep, exactly.
A region of accumulation
where carbon, bone, polymer,
memory, appetite, and salt
were compacted beyond resemblance,
until what had been separate
acquired the intimacy of strata.
We had imagined the buried thing
as ancient, therefore other.
We were wrong about the direction of inheritance.
It had our discarded faces.
It dreamed in obsolete smokestacks,
in slaughterhouse drains,
in the mineral taste of batteries
split open under rain.
Its nerves were cable
gnawed clean of messages;
its pulse, the slow compression
of every chamber we filled
and labeled away.
Where we had cut out hunger,
it grew a mouth.
Where we had cut out terror,
an eye without an eyelid.
Where we had cut out lust,
a vast adhesive tenderness
for whatever could be taken inward.
Where we had denied death,
it learned duration.
And where we had named ourselves clean,
above the animal, above the mud,
above the soft commerce of rot,
something below us gathered
all excluded matter to itself
and became heavy.
Not evil.
The word was too human
and arrived too late.
Not nature,
if nature means the garden
before the factory was built.
Not god,
unless a god may be assembled
from everything its worshipers refuse to touch.
Yet it had gravity.
Tides leaned toward it.
Whales altered their routes.
In coastal towns the sleepers woke
with salt at the corners of their mouths
and dreams of green architecture
rising without construction—
angles loyal to pressures
our bodies were not made to survive.
Children drew the same spirals
in dust on parked cars.
Dogs barked at storm drains.
At the rendering plant
three men opened a clogged sluice
and found, among grease and hide,
translucent polyps contracting
in one rhythm.
The reports called them anomalous.
The river kept its own report.
Summer warmed the reservoirs.
Algae thickened.
Pipelines sweated through insulation.
Fields drowned, dried, drowned again.
The forest burned to mineral skeletons
and returned in weeds
the fire had not been taught to kill.
Every system designed for removal
became a system of return.
The stack exhaled into cloud.
The cloud entered pasture.
The pasture entered milk.
The milk entered children.
The children dreamed the drowned city.
By then the name had surfaced.
Cthulhu—
not rising from some innocent abyss,
not summoned from beyond the stars,
but shouldering upward through our categories,
wearing apocalypse as compost wears heat,
made enormous by the mass
of everything we had called beneath us.
The first tower to collapse
did not fall toward the sea.
It bowed.
Windows burst inward.
Gulls dropped screaming from the air.
In the flooded underpass, weeds
unfurled from cracks in concrete
with a speed no season authorized.
And we, who had spent centuries
placing the unwanted outside the wall,
under the floor, across the border,
downstream, offshore, out of sight,
stood at last before the arithmetic
of accumulation.
There was no outside.
The god opened no mouth.
The god required no hymn.
From the broken sewer,
from the thawing dump,
from the harbor slick with rainbow oil,
from our own warm breath
clouding the evacuation glass,
the buried world rose through us.
And recognized its body.