you, specter, posing as my river

shallows stoop to dams upstream

can I mop shoals' riffles clean?

soils lure salmon to hatch

tracks point to the attack

face-down atomic remains

float, dredged pain from

a seventy-year nuclear chain

my friend turns away

old scars still cast their sway

willows spread at Hiroshima's Ota

cousins of Columbia's mulberries

tree-lost banks wounded, leached

clusters at spoil banks once sap-fed

songbirds wing over roots bled

Kyoko sees faces in the waters

we search the cliffs, Hanford Reach

I, to find unfelt nuclides beached

she, with slipped-off skin from child's frantic arms

Shall I show you how we dressed our wounds?

Manhattan-reached Hanford, now breached

Plutonium frolics in the Columbia

water's edge where poisons percolate

fish test positive, Pluto invades their fat

Hanford claims, "Oh we don't test for that!"

once your waters had spine

ice floods churned its glacial brine

locomotive flows tore the scabbed land, 

grinding falls cut channels new

Columbia's riverscapes engined true

Where are the people who worked here?

I give her photos: a hundred thousand hired

avoiding war, working The Area

hopeful faces at tent cities' cots

from weathered farms to a secret spot

coyotes, deer see us, turn away

leery pelicans, cormorants fly

(honest decent humans, she and I)

animals flee up teal-fled creeks

our reactors, welded shut, still leak

--Tom Buchanan    

Going Deeper

Columbia River Shadows Series

Radioatctive Oysters in Willapa Bay, WA