Lithium Dreams (White Sea)

The Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia holds the world’s largest lithium reserves. “As remote and unlikely a place as can be imagined for the world to seek its salvation.”—Matthew Power Once, volcanoes walked & talked like humans. Married. Quarreled & gave birth. When the beautiful Tunupa’s husband ran away & took their only child she mourned: she cried & stormed, her full breasts spilled until she made this sunken bed, a dry & ragged ice-white sea. Tears & milk. Salt. Silver liquor of the spirits, the winter tuber’s pulp. ≈ Buzz Aldrin spied a plain from space: twice Rhode Island-sized, not a glacier but this vast evaporation, a place so flat we use its plane to calibrate the altitude of satellites, measure the retreat of polar ice. A dry lagoon of element. Energy.Winking like a coin in a well. ≈ In bare Salar the tourists bottle sand & salt: mug & pirouette across this lithic sink of drought, empty leagues of sky & light, slight mist of silt. We dream our dreams of clean—or cleaner— means to drive and speak—o Li, atomic number three, be our Miracle element! Prehistoric smelt, simmered & distilled in Altiplano climes, your samite matter known to quiet, after all, the manic brain, the urge to suicide; proven to dispel the voice that whispers fire from the gods is never free— Lithium chloride & plain table salt under ancient ocean crust; fossils & algae; a bird so bright & blackly drowned, pickled in the salt brine pool: the desert is generous. The desert is a pot boiled dry. This road will turn to dirt and then to salt, to the workers in jumpsuits, veiled & covered from the brutal sun; but we’re not here, not here— what matters are the distant cities: Chongquing, Phoenix, Quebec, Lagos, far & star-chalked: splitting at the seams. Now ≈ the shrouded workers wait for sunset. The desert is patient. They see the bed plowed under: slapdash trenches in the legend, in the hasty furrows raked. With eyes narrowed from the endless light. See Litio. Wages in the veins laid open; see paid the lush reduction of her ditches’ spill. This new abyss to feed our traffic.