Timothy McBride

Sierra Blanca                                                                                 

“I asked God to help me out. But I'm pretty sure the others did the same thing.”

—Miguel Rodriguez, one of 19 Mexicans found in an air-tight, steel-walled boxcar

     opened by border patrol agents at Sierra Blanca, Texas, July 2, 1987.

Inside it was 160 degrees.

Insulated. Air-tight. Locked.

Eight hours from Dallas,

they ran out of water.

And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him into the ark

because of the waters of the flood.

Now jokes turn to panic.

Clawing the floorboards. Beating

the walls. Prayers and curses

drowned out by the moving wheels.

           
And God looked upon the earth, and behold it was corrupt, for all flesh

had corrupted his way upon the earth.

In Oaxaca, they earned 50 cents an hour:

$4.00 for an eight-hour day,

$20 a week, $92 a month,

$1,114 a year . . .

And the Lord said unto Noah come thou and all thy house into the ark,

for thee I have seen righteous.

The car was built to haul beer:

9 kegs per skid, 12 skids

per tier, 3 tiers.

Room enough for 19 men.

And the length of the ark was 300 cubits, and the breadth of it 50 cubits,

and of lower, second, and third stories was it made.

Naked in the suffocating heat,

in the dark, they flailed and fought.

They tore their hair. They moaned and wept.

After six hours, they began to die.

And God remembered Noah and every living thing, and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters were assuaged.

From inside, movement was hard to judge:

they were boring to the center of the earth;

they were flying at the sun. By morning,

they came to rest at Sierra Blanca, the white mountain.

And the fountains of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the ark rested in the 17th month on the 17th day upon the mountains of Ararat.

In English, a voice cried, "Help us.

Please. Help us." And the doors

were drawn back and 18 men were dead.

Illegals. Wetbacks. Pendejos. Aliens.

And God spoke unto Noah saying go forth from the ark, thou and thy wife and they sons and thy sons' wives, and Noah went forth.

Convulsions, heat stroke, seizures.

Some chewed off their tongues—

Their upturned faces ungodly,

ungodly their unspeakable end.

And God said unto Noah: I will set my bow in the cloud that I may remember

my covenant with every living creature of all flesh.

In ice their bodies were shipped south,

back to the land of their dominion,

to their graveyards and families,

their dry and sanctified earth.

And these are the generations of the sons of Noah and unto them were sons born,

and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood . . .

Mme. Curie                                                                                      

“The earth is a storehouse stuffed with explosives.”
—Frederick Soddy, The Interpretation of Radium

She was the first to see: no center ever holds.

It hadn’t held when she was ten, her sister

and mother dead of typhus and consumption,

Russian soldiers in the Warsaw streets,

her nation torn in thirds—Poland now The Vistula

Long before she stirred the tarry, acrid vats

of Joachimsthal pitchblende, before Pierre was crushed

to death at Pont Neuf, before her ruinous affair

with his assistant, her mind was primed

for what she found:  instability at the core,

the fixed unalterable atoms—building blocks of god—

transmuting into other elements, the dream of alchemy,

Ovid’s “bodies changing into other bodies.”

And her own body changing in the blue-green glow

of radium, her fleur du mal—the slow destruction

blooming in her bones. She was our physicist maudit:

her journal dark as any page of Verlaine or Rimbaud:

 “All my will to live is dead. Tomorrow I’ll be 39.

“I do not love the sun and flowers anymore.”

“Even my children cannot awaken life in me.”

Nor could the lover she later begged in vain

to leave his wife and family: “When you’re with her

my nights are a torment.”  She knew each shifting

isotope of loss, the mincing half-lives of the spurned,

the deadening stability of lead. She took her Nobel Prizes

and hid in darkened rooms: a “concubine” a “homewrecker.”

She died, alone, of radiation poisoning,

her last words, “I want to be left in peace.”

Ten years on, the polonium she named for vanished Poland

set off the Nagasaki bomb.

Her ashes are enshrined in the Grand Pantheon

beside the crypts of Zola and Voltaire—

Mme. Curie, née Maria Salomea Sklowdowska,

her books and journals packed in crates of lead,

not safe to touch for 16,000 years.