U.S. professor disappears during Japan valcano hike.
–CNN World, April 30, 2009
Volcanic eruption at Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland
–CNN Report, April 26, 2010
In April, Craig Arnold entered the volcano.
"Every day poets try to lose control
(I can hear him say although I never met him)
"in a productive way. The earth we know,
the one we don't: Poetry happens
when it can get its footing properly on neither.
"It's the manic in geology that interests me.
Not the Major Oils whose business is to
find and exploit transsexual oil and gas reserves.
We poets undermine the situate.
It's when energy is nearly not contained–
brio under stress, brisance–
that the human spirit can be rampant.
These are the conditions for grace under pressure.
"Immense, the work, to leave behind the gentled parts,
a lone man loggering, and probe the crags
of the infrastructure skull. Phrenologist's art,
to plumb the fractal welter, enigmatic surfaces
crusted with meaning, and enter the informed
enormity of fastnesses, deeps.
To stay the course–temperature rising toward Absolute Jesus–
down to the anatectic charge in the embers,
burnt chemical flowers of igneous on the boil,
the matter of tomorrow's fire.
A poet's visit, I can tell you, is something strange,
like deputizing the face of chaos."
April to April he traveled through the earth
exiting the eruption at Eyjafjallajökull.
"Living or dead we add no weight to the dead weight
of a trundling planet. Our spark weighs naught as a neutrino
but is the imperiled particle of Original Resolve."
2012: a record year for solar storms.
Craig has his eye on those as well,
the hydrogen fire, bright button of awarded sun.
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Eyjafjallajökull: AY-uh-fyat-luk-YOE-kuutl-uh