Centuries, years and months of—

let off a little steam cloud up and sizzle growl stamp-dance quiver     
swell, glow glare bulge
swarms of earthquakes, tremors, rumbles she goes
8.32 am        18 May 1980

superheated steams and gasses
white-hot crumbling boulders lift and fly in a
burning sky-river wind of
searing lava droplet hail,
huge icebergs in the storm, exploding mud,
shoots out flat and rolls a swelling billowing
cloud of rock bits,
crystals, pumice, shards of glass
dead ahead blasting away—
a heavenly host of tall trees goes flat down
lightning dances through the giant smoke

a calm voice on the two-way ex-navy radioman and 
volunteer describes the spectacle —then says, the hot 
black cloud is rolling toward him — no way but wait
his fate

            a photographer's burnt camera
            full of half melted pictures,
            three fallers and their trucks
            chainsaws in back, tumbled gray and still,
            two horses swept off struggling in hot mud
            a motionless child laid back in a stranded ashy pickup

roiling earth-gut-trash cloud tephra twelve miles high ash falls 
like snow on wheatfields and orchards to the east five hundred 
Hiroshima bombs

in Yakima, darkness at noon