How to Survive Nuclear War

dreamed early 1980s by Maxine Kumin

After reading Ibuse's Black Rain

Brought low in Kyoto, too sick with chills and fever to take the bullet train to Hiroshima, I am jolted out of this geography, pursued by Nazis, kidnapped, stranded when the dam bursts, my life always in someone else's hands. Room service brings me tea and aspirin. This week the Holy Radish Festival, pure white daikons one foot long grace all the city's shrines. Earlier, a celebration for the souls of insects farmers may have trampled on while bringing in the harvest. Now shall I repent? I kill to keep whatever pleases me. Last summer to save the raspberries I immolated hundreds of coppery Japanese beetles. In some respects, Ibuse tells me, radiation sickness is less terrible than cancer. The hair comes out in patches. Teeth break off like matchsticks at the gum line but the loss is painless. Burned skin itches, peels away in strips. Everywhere the black rain fell it stains the flesh like a tattoo but weeks later, when survivors must expel day by day in little pisses the membrane lining the bladder pain becomes an extreme grammar. I understand we did this. I understand we may do this again before it is done to us. In case it is thought of to do to us. Just now, the homage that I could not pay the irradiated dead gives rise to a dream. In it, a festival to mourn the ritual maiming of the ginkgo, pollarding that lops all natural growth from the tumorous stump years of pruning creates. I note that these faggots are burned. I observe that the smoke is swallowed with great ceremony. Thereupon every severed shoot comes back, takes on a human form, fan-shaped, ancient, all-knowing, tattered like us. This means we are all to be rescued. Though we eat animals and wear their skins, though we crack mountains and insert rockets in them this signifies we will burn and go up. We will be burned and come back. I wake naked, parched, my skin striped by sunlight. Under my window a line of old ginkgos hunkers down. The new sprouts that break from their armless shoulders are the enemies of despair.