But the blessed time is effaced.
She must leave the land of Science
To go out and struggle for her bread
On the grey roads of life.
Often and often then, her weary spirit
Returns beneath the roofs
To the corner ever dear to her heart
Where silent labor dwelled
And where a world of memory has rested.

-Marie Curie, ca. 1893-94

PART I


There is a broken circle
and a circle getting smaller and smaller.

Marie! Your children wear such frightened clothes!
They shiver
arms crossed and clutching their shoulders
They throw more wood on the fire
They carry the light with them into the caves and
paint the walls with their lives

The rain, the earth : borders are irrelevant
When they dance for the dead
It is the future as well as the past

I too was dealt aces and eights--
the dead man's hand--
at birth

I live in the city of Madame Curie
Her hair grows long in the Parisian graveyard
Matted and sticky as sugar spun between wooden spoons
--Angel Hair!--
Her skin dissolving into chaos
A promise old as stone
Then the mouth dreaming equations
This confusion of physics
                         hovering and slain
                         cruel and idealized
                  Marie is the perfect and terrible mother
                  Goddess of the dog days of the twentieth century
                  Brilliant and modern as Radium

Choice trembles in the night air
The city white as bone, smoking with fog
Disquieting as my grandmothers who undressed in cold bathrooms away from the eyes
of their husbands
It is autumn
        The air hums
pervasive and eerie
Large bells left to die after Angelus
Speaking whatever language you were born into

Men moving the machines in a slow arc over
The land
It's 
Clicking
As if it was
Something good
Coins lost in the sand

My sister-in-law calls to say she is pregnant for the third time
and it will be a boy
        The egg slips and mates
        The migration begins with neurons, their
        impeccable placement
                           Minute homing pigeons of sternum, spine

She says she knows it will be a boy because a woman held a string weighted with stones
over her wrist
If it moves in a circle, it's a girl. But it swung back and forth, so...

The light of the world
illuminating the abdominal wall: and inside a small fish sleeps
in its circular sea

Can you say that place is
free
of contamination?
Where they never chose to make their home
The family gathered
and sheared
staked to the horrified light at Ground Zero
The well water tasting of metal
The clouds shaped like animals

Test it
as the scientist tests the Shroud of Turin, the
flutes and skulls from a cave outside Beijing
Radiation reveals the age

Savannah is burning, Madame Curie. You may no longer stop
Along the road to Savannah. If your car breaks down,
don't get out.

The gist of Sparta--sacrificing this
child and 
that child

It is all one city built of myth and stone
One singer
One torch song
One backwater blind pig

The day began with us
climbing down from the trees of Africa
Bones hard as teeth talking the invisible language of the stars
In the swamps
Below the Columbia River
Above the Hudson in the Cloisters of the Bronx
Angel Trumpets fill the air
Fragrant and poisonous

The neighbors gather on my front lawn in their 
underwear-! Bare in their
Arguments,
Taking on water--

        They're burning the wrong witch!
        among the radioactive isotopes where the road disappears driving
        Straight into the desert
        And the light burns the sky up
        And the earth shudders from the inside out

There's nothing left but us fish
with a heart and a head and a gun

Each element on earth has its own spectrum

The same colors
appear in space
There's the malignant blue house of the Southwest
Its simmering uranium lakes

and farther out the 
frigid lavender twilight of Manhattan

The Pope allowed: God is Mother who does not want to harm us
Einstein promised her:  We can run fast as light
        We can catch the light between the quick and the dead.