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The peril of extinction brings us up against this reality,
this simple basic fact: Before there can be good or evil,
service or harm, lamenting or rejoicing, there must be life.[1]

About Considering

Consider is the word 
the bishops used last fall 
as counsel to their people concerning buildup 
for a war by holocaust. Consider. 

A not-bad word, considering. 
It makes you grateful you exist and can—
consider, that is. 
You pay attention, you notice. 
You want to be worthy of considering, consideration. 

That’s after all how you decide what hurts or makes you happy.
In this of all matters, it matters. 

Given the idea, it is not a question of either words 
or numbers, but something that will keep us humans 
in business, the considering to which God bows, 
to which theories of matter and mattering 
come second if at all. 

Relativity. I understand that’s where it started. 
Einstein and his “energy equals mass times the speed of light
squared.” 

To consider must be relative as well. 
Relative to all I ever learned 
in coming to this moment when speed of light 
squares off against the speed of time. 

And what I would consider 
in this late season is: to calculate whether we peacemakers
shall inherit or destroy 
this blessed earth. 

Consideration I

In Biology I at East High
I first learned: Matter can neither be created 
nor destroyed, only altered. 

Mr. Garratt, all ravaged moustache and rimless glasses, 
moved with buffalo shoulders, walked formaldehyde 
among his vials and microscopes 
intent on frogs’ vessels he could pluck with tweezers 
to twang across the cognizance of fifteen-year-olds 
tracing pulses for a grade 
in the science of life. 

Once, standing behind his high green counter in B-14 
he lit a strip of litmus 
in the blue gas flame of a Bunsen burner, 
held its slim inches between his thumb and fingers, 
watched the flame lick blue and yellow 
till he had to drop it in a Petrie dish to finish. 

From the fourth tier of pocked, armed desks, 
my engines running, I watched the paper burn, 
turn to ash, curl into itself 
first black then grey 
fine as the gossamer of remembering. 

Not created. Not destroyed. Altered. 

The arm of my desk like a Ouija board lifted 
my hand expecting answers. 

But only now the questions: 
After the flames, where the turning 
one way or another? Where the Phoenix? 
The ascension? 

Mr. Garratt, considering, I remember 
ashes. Out of which nothing pours, rises, touches 
freezes or floods. 

Did what we learned mean anything?

Consideration II

In Salt Lake City, the morning of August 6th, 1945, the intersection
of First South and Main steamed under pedestrian traffic. 
Street cars clanked out passengers from their middles, 
took them up and in on flop-down steps in front. 
A few cars cruised the block for angled parking 
they would likely find in front of First Security, 
Montgomery Ward, ZCML 

At 10 A.M. on August 6th, 1945, I was walking east, 
on break from my first full-time job, theoretically in advertising,
actually spraying fourteen hundred and 
thirty-one colors on poster board 
at Bennett Glass and Paint. 
I walked past Dinwoodey’s, 
through the aroma of coffee being ground 
at Cooks a block away, 
to the clock in front of Zion’s Bank. 

Four newsboys 
I could hear before I got there: 
“Big Bomb Dropped on Japs!” “Extra, Extra! War Over Soon!”
“Extra, Extra! New Atom Bomb!” and “Extra, Extra Hiroshima Bombed!
Spells Peace!” 

On the slant newsstand the fat paper. 
Under the fat headlines, the fat mushroom cloud. 
In the head of a twenty-year-old the wedding 
of hope and destruction. 

I was bound to believe. 
Too full of youth and desperation 
not to. At a corner, August shimmering hot and blue 
for Utah, the not inconsiderable considerations: 

My brother Homer home from the catapult 
of his carrier in the Pacific. Guam 
and Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima back to maps 
and fiction 
with sun instead of Stan and Clint 
and Wilbur splashing on their shores.

Them back to filling tanks 
and buying steaks and saddle shoes and sugar, 
even nylon stockings for a girl—
all without a coupon. 

Susan’s father, Margaret’s husband, 
Grant, Parley, Jay—nobody else—ever! 
listed in the paper Missing, Wounded, 
Dead. 

No more graveside flags and bugles. 
Stuart out of prison camp, 
back from the Philippines, home. 

The bomb? 
Like the sacking of Troy, something to survive forever 
in remembering. 

In that time so few things we needed to know. So 
if the bomb ignited Nagasaki too? 

In our steady attention to ceremony, 
didn’t Admiral Halsey and the Missouri 
plow into Tokyo Bay by the 14th? 
Didn’t Hirohito and MacArthur sign us 
into peace for all time? 

Didn’t we sing “Happy Days are Here Again”? 

Knowing what of gene mutations 
for thirty generations and radioactivity 
that could shift monsoons 
and cool the earth? 

Didn’t we go kissing and honking 
in a giddy, waving hail 
of filled up hallelujahs 
down Main from First South 
bumper to bumper all the way 
to Liberty Park? 

Like after any war, the celebrants.
The only thing created: 
the power to destroy. 

A finer ash 
than litmus, Mr. Garratt. 
A long long way past Troy.

Consideration III

In the 60s my freshman English classes stayed 
at maybe thirty. Names came easy—in college 
only surnames plus Mr., Miss, now and then a Mrs. 
Polite and dignified the distance between rollbook 
and desks. But like most affected distances 
yielding to insistent 60s leaping of the gaps. 

In English 2 the research paper 
written partly from a Source Book so I the teacher 
could substantiate the footnotes, 
interpret the interpretations, grade 
considerations. 

Mr. Kerowski, behind Miss Dodd, right hand rear 
of Orson Spencer 118 at 7:45, wore bib overalls, 
toyed at his temple with blond frizz backed into a pony tail.
His French blue eyes took on John Hersey’s Hiroshima 
like stil ponds with wooded edges, 
reflecting, absorbing, giving back. Once he asked 
in class, considering, “Mrs. Thayne, did you really see 
the pictures then—the eyes?” 

I knew he meant the unbelieving eyes 
in that 60s source book. 

And yes, I saw them 
in the seeping faces 
and tried then to remember if first 
before or after Don next door came home, 
his destroyer drydocked, and thirty-thousand like him 
on the G. I. Bill come back to life in Utah 
to sit in classrooms where Mr. Kerowski and inquisitor 
Miss Dodd, brown eyed and abundant, now a quarter century
later sat, her asking, “So what would those few days 
have meant? The war was over, American authorities—they
knew—not a week at most before surrender would have come—
and those people—hundreds of thousands 
turned to pulp 
in Hiroshima . . . “

All those quarters I told about December 7th— 
what I remembered of the Day of Infamy
to justify, to justify: the flag, the Star Spangled Banner,
Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt 
and us at seventeen packed into the Union Building Ballroom
listening to the declaration, wondering 
what war was. 

We who could not know that flame would 
follow flame until the word for war was a word on fire,
in even our cloistered mountain deserts The Red Cross,
the USO, and men from Kearns in stiff boots 
on their way overseas dancing meantime 
on our floors and 
in our dreams ashes to ashes 
about to justify, to justify. 

And Don and Scott and Rob and Homer— 
of the thirty-thousand home, how many
would have died? I tried to keep on asking 
and graded thirty, sixty, ninety research papers 
some written so well I could tell 
it happened again, again Hiroshima 

that quarter and the next and next 

not what the scientists and admirals and source book
brought to mind, but what my students saw, 
what I remembered: 

Torako Hironaka. 

In her eyes a field of watermelons split, 
a dead horse, 
burned down power lines. 
Her breasts torn, 
Torako naked 
walking in fragments of glass 
crying “Aigo! Aigo!” 

Her a vast sorrow 
in the unforgettable fire 
among other naked girls crying “Stupid America!”

My America. 
My land of liberty and noble intention. 

To whom I sang, sing. 

And me grading papers 
looking at myself 
and fire and ashes 
with eyes only starting to see.

Consideration IV

In the 50s we had five daughters. 
They were one thing 
growing up and dating boys who in the 70s
missed Viet Nam 
but went away to summer camp 
and made black jokes about the military. 

But then they married. And I have seen 
five grandsons and two baby girls 
born in these eight years. 

Each time it’s gone like this—
five months ago for Coulson Paul, 
six weeks ago for Michael Abraham— 
I in that delivery room in my greens 
official photographer. 

I never saw my children born, 
but bringing in another generation 
I saw it all: 

The mother, our daughter, pushing, obedient.

The doctor deft, all rubber hands and arms.

The father and I watching in rapture, terror, awe: 

The coming! 
The breathless what is “it”? 
Mottled scalp. Bluish head. 
White face. Turkey neck. Chest 
more narrow than the head. Arms 
akimbo. 
Frog belly still connected. 

A boy! A blazing genital boy. 

Lifeless.

Smooth clay, lavendar 
under cottage cheese netting. 

The cord a milksnake 
snapped 
clamped. 
Syringe into mouth. 
All of him dangling from the big gloved hands 
re-arranging him. 

Breahe, little boy! Breathe! 

Then, the life! 

His one-inch hand with bright pink nails 
opening. His lower lip curling. 
The tiny tongue pushing out. 
His head back—Waa! 

The chest rising, 
knees coming up. Feet kicking. Arms 
flailing. 

A sniff of oxygen from a miniature mask. 

Into a blanket. 
Given to his father. 
Taken to his mother. 
Me forgetting to snap what I came for. 

No. We all had what I came for: 

The wanted baby. Alive and well. 

No. More. 
The pure gift. 
Life. 
God’s hand handing, 
the voice saying, “Let there be life.” And 
‘It is very good.” 

Still in my greens 
I went to make my call. 
The walls sang, the doors and staircases 
danced.

I tried to tell on the phone what had happened. 
It came out, “He’s here. Seven ten. He’s just fine.
So is his mother.” 

But in my car, my compact Fiesta Plum 
I turned up E Street to high 1 lth Avenue. 

I could see the mountains, the valley, 
the city spangling on a hot July night. 
On my stereo Anna Moffo sang the aria with flute
from Lucia. 

“Birds,” I thought, “streams and wind songs in trees.

My whole life.” 

Not a specific held in my head. 

Only a giant rising and flowing 
like the tears in that room, 
that delivery room. 

Delivery? Deliverance? Delivered? 

I had been part of what makes clouds or the smell of rain
or the rhythm of sleeping and waking up. My skin
was the skin of the sky, 
my traveling flight. 
My arrival as ongoing as prayer. 

Going home I would never be the same. I had been
home. Where else was there to go? 

Now these weeks and months away from that astonishment
I think of babies 
growing up to smile, touch, 
run and sing and cry. 

And one day to see their own be born. 

And of the tons of dust and debris fused with 
intensely radioactive fission products and sucked up
into the mushroom cloud, the mixture to return to earth
as radioactive fallout, most of it in the form of fine
ash, the sky and the earth altered.

11th Avenue gone 
and no mountains 
no radiant city 
to exult with in the night. 

Coulson Paul Rich or Michael Abraham Markosian 
or maybe even Katie Ann Kilgore 
ghosts? 
Mustered to contend with 
what is left by arsenals of armaments: 
Ashes? 

And I say No. For them for me, for all of us 
with lots of places yet to go. 

No. No thank you. No.

Consideration V

Thinking of her white hair never put in a bob 
and her fingers lumped around needles 
I called my Aunt Edna to say, “I’ve tried to reach you 
to come for Sunday dinner.” 

                                                I could feel 
her unhurrying smile up out of her hurrying. 
She’s eighty-three. “If you ever want to reach me,” 
she said, “call before seven or after eleven. I’m 
with the Happy-Go-Luckies.” 

                                                I do now, knowing 
she’s off somewhere other hours with the band, 
the big harmonica band of the 10th East Senior Citizens’ Center.
Mostly they’re booked weeks ahead, at Christmas time months.
“How many are you?” I ask. 

                                                “Oh, maybe sixty 
when we’re all together.” I can feel her beam. 

‘Do you get any training to play?” 

                                                “Oh sure, our leader, Ab—
he’s really something. He tells you where to find the hole
and then you just blow draw blow.” 

Blow draw blow? No valves? No mouth and tongue 
and hands arranged for sharps or flats? The band I hear
is better than the old calliope at Liberty Park. 
They can go wishful as a bow on a saw by a man in prison
or ragamuffin as a turkey trot on Halloween. 
These old ones who have perfected their fears and celebrations. 

They’ve had time. Like Aunt Edna gathering eggs, 
throwing balls at Morgan County fairs, run off at seventeen
to marry, stand on cement floors to sell men’s lapels, 
this year’s wide, next year’s narrow in ZC’s budget store,
ride the bus at eight and six without vexation 
to fix the meals and bottle the fruit 
and plant the chrysanthemums for five children 
and a husband “predisposed to drink.”

Until the children married, 
he died, and she retired at seventy 
to her unlonely music and the shawls 
crocheted for over sixty babies 
in a solitude cramming her lifetime together 
where a thousand hands could not accommodate 
her generous resolve to get on with life. She continues,
Aunt Edna. 

                        The continuers. 
I used to have a string of them to play across by screen 
in the night when my own visions ran pale: Mother, Father,
twelve uncles and my varigated aunts, even grandmas 
and their slow syllables on my unlighted spaces. 

I could count on them to speak a language I never 
could not understand: To tell me how. 

                                                Now, them forced 
one at a time from the screen, only Aunt Edna remains
to say, to show or tell me where she already is, 
has come from. And she, my only history now 
about to become another missing face. 

I want her at my table. 
Through her I can walk past myself 
and remember what is yet to come. But at that table 
mostly I am older than the rest. The house has thickened.
My husband and I, brothers, sisters, friends 
startle ourselves with lingering past the childhood 
that no longer includes us. We have grown huge with our following
as our clusters of kin and contemporaries thin out 
till everywhere now is a dead and a living place. 

We will find each other next in a dream, 
our boundaries having moved with us, 
no one left to look to but ourselves. So little time 
for the looking to each other. 

In the quiet, in my clumps of thought 
I am joined now by your music, Aunt Edna. 
I lie in bed and spread the light of it 
with my fingers on the wall 
where the shapes slide and become a calligraphy, 
the signs of a language we speak only in shadows.

It says, Consider: Coming to know how to blowdrawblow 
is right. Knowing how 
before you die to grow so keenly old must be the answer: 
There in your late music. 

Experts tell us that in the thermal pulse two miles across 
any human beings would be reduced to smoke and ashes. 
They would simply disappear. Babies, old folks, 
us in between the same. 
With no history left to rely on 
or music to pass along. 

Or a word to say I loved you all . . . 

                                                But not enough 
to end the race to stockpile devastation 
before it ended us. 

What fear compels us more than what we love? 
What does it matter what we know? 
Where might be the courage to blow draw blow?

Consideration VI

The man at Dachau 
didn’t know of course that I was watching him, 
me for my first time in Europe that August of 1982 
sprung giddy from the Jungfrau, Lake Geneva 
Eurail, pension, a bus of swaying shoulders 
through Munich to Dachau. 

This we thought would be a place to look at fear 
and how to overcome it. But in the museum a single film 
had been enough for me: Ignited eyes, boned corpses. 
I chose to wait, solitary, on cement steps to an old entry 
while my family went to tour the ovens. 
Despairing in that stark enclosure, I thought, 
“Is this how we grope our way past the terrors, 
of this century? By coming to this place of gloom? 
Here where life is written off before it has begun?” 

But thirty feet away a man my age stood in the vast 
square of gravel and took over my personal history. 

He and I were alone in that place that is a place, 
me on my steps in my Levi skirt and running shoes, 
him in his light blue suit and shirt and tie, 
even his hair like women dipped in bluing, 
his DeGaulle profile an imprint 
on the rain-heavy sky. He leaned up from a strand 
of mahogany cane, alert 
as if in one of those childhood games 
played only after dark, everyone frightened 
of being found. 

He stared across the desolate parade ground. 
His gaze, like memory pulled across a rasp, riveted 
on the blue plaster barracks and the one door, a blue door, 
as if it had scent and vibration across the distance 
to his face and was waving him back through history.

He watched the door, I watched him, both of us 
at eye level with that dead and living picture: 
Behind him an L of grass. Beyond it the black metal sculpture:
Bodies, fingers, knees—going up in smoke. Out of sight
a child wailing MaMaaaa. A far rim of trees, not one
old. 

Their leaves of course contained in them instructions to fall.
They would whirl unamazed into the next season. Others would
be back green, new growth no more than 
the changing of skins. 

But the seasons that had turned that man and me 
grey had not prepared us for letting go. 
I felt what it was like to be part of a space not mine, 
to shiver at wanting something to hold to 
and having only shards even to grasp for. He became all I had,
the present, a presence: He will always be here. 

            He stares without motion, involved as a lover 
            awaiting a lover in a crowd. Like a camera his gaze inches
            from end to end of the barracks, returns, returns 
            to the door. It is more than a memorial he is attending.
            The building keeps everything; it remembers. 
            He listens to its voices with a look of such sadness 
            I want to touch it away. Who might have known I could be
            so held by what passes between a stranger and the years,
            him searching for a day and finding it? 

            From his blue door, what corpses thrown out, 
            limbs so smooth they might have been alive? 
            Civilian? Soldier? Captive? Was he one who with calipers
            extracted teeth and ran? Where might those legs have been?
            And how did they perform in Dachau? 
            It is happening again in the blue of his eyes 
            on that blue door. 

            Eyes still on the door, he turns, tries to vanish 
            as a person would having seen it all. 
            But his body speaks. 
            Its faithless legs become flippers. 
            They do not walk, they go toe first, 
            calf extended, toe, heel, hinges sprung 
            to flop ahead past the ballast of the flimsy cane, 
            toe after toe dragging in gravel, 
            a masterpiece of regret, holy and helpless.

            Retreating, he halts at a three-inch step. 
            He reaches hand to knee 
            pulls each leg up, over. 
            Eyes still on the door 
            in a day that revolves too close around us both, 
            he pulls himself erect. Contained, as if wound 

            he starts up again, loses his saving shape, 
            plummets 
            like a timber to the iron fence, 
            his cane a small crash. 

            His hands, free and ready 
            as if part of an act no one wanted to see, 
            catch the skeleton that hauls itself together, 
            straightens, 
            and like a movie of destruction playing backwards 
            flop flop flip flops, 
            a blue stick figure off and gone from everything 
            but the camera in my grey head. 

It’s five o’clock. The parade ground 
is almost empty. My family are still somewhere
maybe underground, touring. 

And if they were never to come back? Who would I be? 
I who thought I was the sort of girl to leave a page 
because one hand held another, 
or could skim or skip some altogether. 

But not so. The six million 
talk to me without their crypts and ashes. 

Like my man in blue they have teeth to brush 
and loves to find 
and blue doors needing to be looked into. 

Now here they come, the alive ones, 
my four dears back from the furnaces 
walking from behind the sign MUSEUM. 

Under it the large outstanding script 
in four languages: NEVER AGAIN.

Suppose the ovens were thermal nuclear? 
Out of them clouds of dust 
and mushroom clouds spreading over 
anywhere we were, coming together 
to form vast camopies, to turn day into night.
Fires would spring up in Munich 
and Mt. Air Canyon—
in every forest dry enough to burn, 
in the seeping rubbish of Salt Lake City 
and Sanpete County. And in San Francisco,
Bangkok 
Florence 
Bombay 
Kiev 
and Chad, Nigeria. 

The world would simply go from boom to fire to ash.

Evacuation? Shelters? 

No way. 
No hole big enough 
to hide or bury 
all of us or nature in. 

And no one left 
to consider: Even extermination 
was not extinction. 

More than NEVER AGAIN — 

NEVER! 

Not even now the last consideration — 
the bleak obscenity 
of racing to out race each other 
to the end.

Considering—The End

So finally I consider only life: The holocaust ahead 
would leave no one behind 
to question how we happened not to happen 
in any moment but our tragic own. 

I have only one voice, one language, 
one set of memories to look back on, 
a thousand impulses to look ahead 
if I will 
if there is time 
to consider: 
How much for the earth? 
what would I keep? 

Blue mountains against a black sky, 
Smiles exchanged so well we do not know our ages or conditions. 

Snow melted, leaves moving again, 
In a voice, rain finding its way to the stream. 

Heat rising like wands from the desert, 
A could drink, the touch of hair enough all by itself. 

First apricot pickle sharp, a phone ringing on time, 
Lights going on, wanting them off for the dark. 

A song flooded with memory, smell of pinon in fire, onion in stew,
A dancer watched like a child, a child in flight like a dancer. 

Hot soup, hot bath, hot air to take to the canyon, 
Aging slowly from the bones outward, time to pick and choose. 

A wooden spoon, the white whisper of a needle in cloth, 
Laughing like tossed water, skis on snow. 

Smell of soap, hot animal. An apple, crisp. A ball hit, 
Tongue of a lover, dream of a dead mother stroking our cheek.

An idea, the Pieta, the Hand of God, a word, a prayer, 
The word, the earth far from without form and void. 

The earth created and not destroyed. If altered, 
not back to darkness upon the face of the deep. 

You, me, combinations of color and sound, 
The spirit of God moving upon the waters. 

A child born, an aunt with reason to blow draw blow, 
A celebration for the end of war. A new generation inevitable. 

The coming of sun because it is good. 
A world alive for a blue door to open onto. 

A candle, a kiss, eyes meeting. Holding. 
Life—to consider. 

Then no more considering, hypothesizing, tolerating. 

No litmus-paper ending in a cosmic Petrie dish. 

No more silence. 

For the earth? 

For the life in me, in you, 
I say Yes. Yes thank you, Yes. 

In your breath fused with mine 
Even ashes stir and glow. 

It’s time. It’s time we said together 
Yes to life. To ashes, simply No. 

---

[1] [Editor’s Note: This footnote was an asterisk in the printed version] Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth, Avon, N.Y., N.Y., 1982.