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"untitled" issue
december 2002
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michael ceraolo
Euclid Creek: Installment 3 of ???
Part Two
I
The creek flows continuously,
as does time,
roaring
when swollen by spring rains
or the sudden summer thunderstorm,
trickling
in the heat of the usual summer drought,
escaping
from its captivity
during the first thaw of the winter ice,
always
subject to the mysteries
of the water cycle
And
even before
the creek had begun
its journey to the inland sea,
even
before the history
of this place began,
even
before the planet
itself began,
there were many more mysteries
Before the Beginning
was the Word,
and the word
was Mystery,
the first
and still
the greatest mystery,
the mystery
that no one has yet
even tried to explain,
the mystery
of the time
before Time,
of the infinite day
before Creation
And then
came the next mystery,
that
of the Beginning itself,
a beginning
of which
we think we know how,
thanks
to a lot of dry scientific explanations,
though
they don’t explain,
and can’t explain,
and we don’t know,
why;
a beginning
that we call the Big Bang;
a beginning
that was the explosion of explosions,
an explosion
that would make a hundred Hiroshimas
seem like snapping a twig-
October 20, 1944.
It was a Friday afternoon,
a little after lunch,
nearly three years
into the war effort,
a little less
than ten months before
Hiroshima would explode
into the public’s consciousness,
a day
when it seemed that the war had come to Cleveland
Around 2:30 P.M.
there was heard
what witnesses described as thunder
(probably the gas tanks cracking
and then starting to leak),
followed first
by the formation
of a vapor cloud
and then
by an explosion
that sent tsunamis of fire
a hundred feet tall
c
r
a
s
h
i
n
g
down
on the surrounding area,
devastating a square mile
of the urban landscape,
sending manhole covers
soaring skyward,
razing to rubble
a couple of factories,
destroying nearly
eighty neighboring homes,
tossing cars around
like kids playing jacks
The explosion
pushed the war news
below the fold,
or at least
into less bold
type,
for the next
several days
as the ripple effects
of the explosion
began to be felt,
from factories
unable to remain
in operation
due to a lack of gas
to
a temporary bread shortage
because of a lack of fuel
to fire the bakery ovens
The death toll
continued to climb,
daily,
as the rubble
was slowly dug out
and further devastation discovered,
the toll
reaching a final total
of one hundred thirty
Things
gradually quieted down
and slowly returned
to their normal absurdity,
until
by the next weekend,
just eight or nine days
after the explosion,
crowds of at least
fifty thousand people
gathered to gawk
at the rubble,
free of charge-
There was a labor
that birthed
what we fondly call
Our Universe,
a living thing
like all living things
one day destined to die-
Just as the American chestnut tree,
resident of the area around Euclid Creek
for an eternity on the human scale,
was destine to die off
around 1900,
killed by a blight brought back by man
in his globetrotting travels-
And next
is the mystery
of Our Universe,
a living thing
with a life cycle of such immensity
that we don’t know
and perhaps
can’t know
if it’s young and still growing
or
if it has
already reached adulthood
and begun
the l o n g
s
l
o
w
d
e
c
l
i
n
e
toward its inevitable
death
(And concurrent
with that mystery,
and still current
today,
comes the mystery
of whether
there are other Universes
that lie outside,
or along side,
or inside
Our Universe)
And next
came the mystery
of why,
in a small corner
of a medium-sized galaxy,
merely
a mote
on the tip
of a needle
inside
a haystack
nestled inside
of a
much
much
larger haystack,
a cloud of gas and dust
commenced to condense,
over eons becoming solid,
generating great heat
until
it too exploded,
a Little Bang
that expelled
a fraction
of a percent
of its matter
into billions of miles of space
around the Central Body,
a body
with enough gravitational pull
to hold that matter in thrall,
and being thus held in thrall,
the matter
d
n
c
u
i
o
r
r
c
a
l
d
e
n
d
a
a
d
r
n
o
u
u
o
n
r
d
a
a n d
what we now call
Our Sun-
Today
the sun shines strangely
through the man-made haze
that chemically colors the sky,
a prism that refracts
the lambent light
of the late afternoon sun
into a strange surreal color,
the same color
as the flame
burning atop
the smokestack
of the soon-to-die
steel mill,
a color not seen on Earth
until the advent of industrialism,
a slowly sinking ball
looked down upon
from the top floors
of the downtown highrises
because it appears
lower than man,
until
the sun slips behind
a single shark-shaped dark cloud
to create
an eerie early evening light
that is an omen
of the evening to come-
As
the matter circled
pieces of various sizes
careened into each other
in a kind of cosmic dodge ‘em,
agglomerating themselves
into planets of various sizes,
and this turn
in the celestial amusement park
continued over a period
of hundreds
of millions
of years,
each collision
large and small
generating huge amounts of heat
and more agglomeration;
until,
shortly after
four o’clock in the afternoon
on the day of Our Universe,
what we call Our Planet
was born
And next
came the mystery
of the science-fiction past
of the early eons of the earth
an inhospitable,
atmosphereless,
lifeless place
scarier than nay movie ever made,
experiencing the true fury of aerial bombardment
as asteroids and other astral material
kept crashing to the earth,
experiencing heat hot enough
to melt the pelting iron
and send it
~
s
i
n
k
i
n
g
to the still-solid center of the earth,
experiencing
the volcanic activity
that created oceans
made of magma rather than water,
experiencing
the resulting fires-
March 4, 1908.
To the northeast of the city
in the village of Collinwood,
a name that would later be retained
as that of the neighborhood
when the village was eaten by the city,
three hundred sixty-six students
were being taught a daily lesson
in misplaced civic boosterism
in attending the misnamed Lake View School,
for only eagles could view the lake
from that particular vantage point
The steam pipes coming from the boiler
were working hard to ward off the winter chill
when one of the pipes overheated
The pipes being inexplicably
in contact with the wooden joists
started the deadliest school fire
in the history of the United States
Almost half the school’s students,
one hundred seventy-two to be exact,
along with two teachers and one rescuer,
died in the fire
Almost immediately
rumors circulated concerning
the cause of the high death toll,
blaming the builders and architects
for fatal flaws in the school’s design
But those politically-connected pillars
had nothing to fear liability-wise,
for the coroner came riding to the rescue,
issuing a report on his inquest
that placed the blame on the children
for unwisely panicking in the situation
Today the school building still stands,
though it has been closed for more than twenty years
The windows have been boarded up
Vines are growing on the building
and on the fence that goes around the schoolyard,
a fence rusted and leaning in places
Bricks and other rubble are in piles
on portions of the old schoolyard
A small business occupies an old outbuilding
as it struggles to survive in the current climate
Weeds are growing through the cracks
and have almost completely covered
what was once the concrete playground
One small corner of the schoolyard
is decently maintained as a memorial,
with small trees, shrubs, and flowers
surrounded by bricks containing the names,
not of the dead children,
but of current citizens
and the usual foundation suspects
who were convinced or coerced
to cough up the cash
for the privilege of being so memorialized-
~
~
experiencing
over the next several
hundred million years
the water and carbon
imprisoned inside
the invading material
being freed
after serving their sentences
and
being escorted
to the surface
by volcanic spurts
and post-release
forming an atmosphere
and oceans
made of water
and
experiencing
the ultimate
in greenhouse effect
(at least for this planet)
And
the history
of the early land
thus created
remains another
mystery,
because it occurred
prior to the writing
of the earliest-known volumes
in the library of rock,
and
even the language
of those earliest volumes
was not deciphered
until the twentieth century--
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