But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again
into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life.
Sun Tzu
Suddenly cold, a shuddering rain
freezes our road a broken mirror—
Each day, I study the patterns
of dispersal, seed-heads released on a gust,
Grandfather’s Los Alamos canyons
come to mind (his experiments, his
mind fused, unfocused
now). What are the networks,
the mighty dendrites,
trying to say?
:
What secrets, what
cased implosions, Grandfather,
what fission—was it all
nature’s design? Now your brain—
what are we making?—
whispers bombs. The wind talks
a tin can flat. And after Hiroshima,
did you thirst, as we do,
for an undone God, the mind
like so many crows—burnt kindling—
suddenly floating?
:
In the field
of physics, fatality flowers
as disintegration products—
megatons of TNT—
lenses imploding
toward a volatile core
where isotope
fizzles in inert neurons,
a reference frame
of plaques and tangles.
:
The networks report that today
many (again, in our names)
were killed, incendiary.
At twilight, the aspen here burn
without burning—lights left on
accidentally in the grove.
:
Without effort, the laws of physics erase
the words for moon sunk to its last horn-tip,
erase another hundred faces.
For us, there isn’t a day
the naming is enough: Alzheimer’s, nuclear
arsenals (your truth fused, classified, secretly
detonated). Somewhere nearby, a neighbor drops
a box of tools. This morning, long ago,
my husband and I made love.
Poetry, like God (bomb, sarcophagus),
is just something beautiful to die inside.
Now, there go the geese—a fleet of facts,
of tiny hearts—pencil marks on their way.