Barbie-heimer

I must admit that I don’t have an overwhelming desire to see the “blockbuster”movie Barbie. Sure, I had a Barbie doll. But I didn’t relate to her. She was tall, and impossibly thin with a long blonde ponytail. I took a blunt pair of scissors to her ponytail at one point. Her head came off so easily. As did her arms. Pieces easily went on walkabout.

I couldn’t afford to buy Barbie clothes, she came dressed in a zebra striped bathing suit, and nothing else, other than tiny white high heels. So I made clothing for her but eventually I became bored with her and abandoned her for Tonka Toy (Breyer) horses.

I don’t remember who gave me the doll, I think it was a Christmas gift from our next-door neighbor, ca. 1959 or 60. I was short and dark, and had no boobs to speak of, they were a long way off on the grown-up horizon, so I didn’t relate to her all that much. Besides, I hated the color pink. I think she met her demise via a 4th of July firecracker. Her graffitied carapace became housing for a tiny bomb.

I will probably go and see Oppenheimer, because some of my family history is tied up with Los Alamos—my mother’s cousin, who was brilliant in mathematics, was whisked away right out of high school to work on the bomb. 

We only found this out much later after Marie had died of cancer. In 1990, I made a pilgrimage to the Delgado Bridge in Santa Fe where the Rosenberg spies were captured, and also a visit to the Pajarito Plateau, where we visited the petroglyphs of T’sanque/T’sankawi, and Los Alamos where a spare shells of Fat Man and Little Boy still doze in the museum. 

The place names still haunt me. Los Alamos, Alamogordo, Stallion Gate, Trinity, Oak Ridge, Fermi Institute. I am a child born of the Age of Light. Meanwhile, on the rock outcrops, near Los Alamos, the petroglyph of Kokopelli, playing the water sprinkler, abides.

My cousin’s name was Mary—or Marie—Walsh, as we called her. She was the daughter of Wild Bill, the gambler, and grew up on Home Ranch, in the Reese River Valley. I think she was also my grandmother’s goddaughter. 

My grandmother sometimes received postcards from her, addressed from New Mexico, but no PO Box, or return address. I remember there was a letter with words cut out of it, clearly censored. Like little blank eyes. My grandmother hid them in the top drawer of the bureau beneath her handmade Irish lace, and all her sewing scraps.

In the mid-1970s, I worked for “Crappa,” retired politician Roger Kent, whose father was Senator William Kent (who gave Muir Woods to the Department of the Interior) and Roger’s brother “Buffalo” that is Sherman Kent, was head of the CIA, and they both admitted the Manhattan Project was the best kept secret. 

Even the Kents didn’t know about the Manhattan Project until it was declassified. For a government that didn’t keep secrets well, it was the best kept secret of all. And Sherman—if anyone should have known, it was him, after all, he was a CIA. But Sherman was also in the dark.They were surprised to learn that my cousin, who was gifted with numbers, had worked on the bomb at los Alamos.

Sadly, the math gene blithely skipped over me, is, despite having an Olympic gold medal winner try to teach me, but I do remember the bomb drills where we hid our heads under our desks at Lagunitas School. We covered the back of our necks with one arm, and our eyes with the other, and waited for the drill to be over. The day they were detonating atomic bombs over Jackass flats in Nevada, the entire school went outside to the playground to witness the light. 

We were in West Marin, a long way from Jackass Flats. The sky did go white. And it did sound like you could hear a muffled bomb go off in the distance. 

Later, when I tried to look this information up, I was told the detonation was underground. That what we witnessed was impossible. Maybe so, but we did hear and see something that day when the sky was robbed of color. And we were 500 miles away on the northern coast of California. It made the presence of the atomic bomb far too real for me. I was haunted by nightmares for years to come.

As it turns out, the last above ground nuclear test was July 17, 1962, so yes, we could have witnessed an above ground blast. And every year on Labor Day weekend, I can’t help but think of all the artistic hordes intent on radical self expression, gather at Black Rock Playa to ignite a Burning Man— to burn away the corporate sins of the world. (I attended the first burning man at Baker Beach in San Francisco, 1986.) 

Each year, my old college friend, David Best, erects a phantasmagoric wooden temple—just downwind from that radioactive Armageddon of Jackass Flats. prayer flags in the wind. I can’t help but think of all those radical isotopes on the wing. And how we are all glowing from within during this Age of Light.

see my atomic poem list below

War, Literature & the Arts publication of War’s End (3 Days After Hiroshima)

At last, my Nagasaki poem appeared in the War, Literature & the Arts, an international journal of the humanities / Volume 34 / 2022, from the US Air Force. It was a long birthing process: two and a half years to be exact. And somehow strangely fitting that the Fall issue was published on the winter solstice, the coming of light. 

I don’t publish very often. But this was a wait of epic proportions. First there was Covid, then the editor retired, then the website died, and the web hosting site died as well, so the entire WLA magazine had to be reconstructed from scratch—so this is a brand new website. Thank you, editor Thomas Maguire. Perseverance furthers.

“In 1989 WLA was launched as a simple collection of six essays examining the nexus of culture, conflict, and war. More than three decades later, WLA continues its exploration through a growing range of creative genres. Artists of all types share wars' jagged and fragmented horrors alongside its provocative and captivating narratives.” 

When colleague Jane Hirshfield began to teach poetry workshops on the East Coast, I asked her why she was teaching poetry to West Point cadets, and she said they need poetry more than ever. So I took a page out of her book and submitted this poem to the US Air Force Academy, never dreaming they would take my poem. what a great solstice gift, considering the source of the light. I am Shiva.

Featured poet, John Balaban, with whom I shared a publication credit in the 1995 anthology, Atomic Ghost: Poets respond to the nuclear age, (his title poem, BTW), quoted WH Auden in his preface in WLA.

“The problem for a poet in writing about modern war is that, while he can only deal with events of which he has firsthand knowledge—invention, however imaginative, is bound to be fake—his poems must somehow transcend mere journalistic reportage.” 

Hopefully my poem transcends mere journalistic reportage.

Table of Contents and intro.

Maureen Hurley / War’s End (3 Days After Hiroshima) 

Here is my blog link with photo which they didn’t use.

At the last minute, I was asked to create an author’s note:

Author’s Note

Hurley’s uncles served in the army and navy; one built Liberty Ships at Marinship in Sausalito. Her father served in the Coast Guard, and a cousin, a mathematician, worked on the Manhattan Project. Her neighbor, a ship’s captain, was torpedoed in the Mekong Delta incident. She remembers ducking under her desk as atomic bombs were being detonated in Jackass Flats, NV. Her algebra teacher was Olympic runner and gold medalist Archie Williams, famed Tuskegee airman who trained fighter pilots.

These fragments of personal history inform her writing. Her poems have appeared in Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age (Coffee House Press, 1995), and myriad periodicals. Hurley was co-editor of Tracks in the Widest Orbit: Collected Poems of J. H. Montrose (Russian River Writers’ Guild, 1985). Montrose, a WWII pilot, shared his observations of the Bikini Island nuclear tests with Hurley, and he told her how he flew over Japan dropping leaflets warning them of the Hiroshima bombing. Maureen grew up piecing together fragments of war stories. Poet Jane Hirshfield, who taught poetry to cadets at West Point Military Academy, suggested she submit her poems to journals that address war and its consequences

Marie Walsh

My grandmother‘s niece, Marie Walsh, who grew up at Home Ranch, in the Reese River Valley, a block fault valley near Austin, Nevada, was a math whiz. But she disappeared right out of high school. Whenever my grandmother talked about her, she grew sad, Marie had disappeared. She said Marie was like so like an angel with her golden hair about her, my grandmother explained, task-tisking. My grandmother, who was also her godmother, was distraught by the lack of contact. Eventually postcards with 4-cent stamps began to trickle in from exotic places like Chicago, New Mexico, with no return address. Sometimes there were words cut out of the text going right through the postcards like little windows to the soul, but we couldn't see our way in or out. In this way we kept track of Marie, never knowing the backstory, or where she was. This much we knew, she was gifted in math. It had something to do with crunching numbers. Most of our family never got the math gene but we made up for it with boisterous singing at family parties, and in the gift of the gab. It was during the late 50s or mid 60s that we got the obituary, a small column scalloped by a fingernail scissors. My grandmother kept all Marie's cards and letters in an old cigar box, on the top dresser drawer that doubled as a linen closet. The article said that she had died of cancer and there was a hint of the life she had lead, hidden in the lines. I memorized the names of places, Alamogordo, White Sands, Los Alamos. In this way I learned the reason why we practiced those bomb drills, hiding under our desks, waiting for the big one to drop. During recess we all filed out onto the blacktop to see the white flash in the east, followed by the percussion and the sound as they detonated bombs at Jackass Flats. A neighbor, Roger Kent said the Manhattan Project was one of the best kept secrets during the Cold Was, as even his brother Buffalo, who was in the CIA, didn’t even know about it.

6/16 Mill Valley Library Non-fiction class with Sarah Broderick

WAR'S END (3 days after Hiroshima)

What happened to pilot Major Charles Sweeney
after he dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki?
Did he think he could turn the B-29 Silverplate bomber,

Bockscar, around in the wild blue yonder, then fly back
on empty to Tinian, largest airbase in the world,

as if nothing had happened? After all, he'd practiced
13 trial runs, and 3 dress rehearsals. Shame to waste all that....

The Great Artiste wasn't ready, so he swapped planes.

Ground crew warned him the reserve fuel pump was bad.

The mission was moved up two days because of a typhoon.

Nearing the 11th hour, mad Sweeney circled three times

looking for a gap in the clouds, but he was low on fuel,

so his original target, Kokura, with its venerable castles
obscured by clouds, was spared to live another day.
A fuel pump sealed the fate of Japan's window to the world.
Nagasaki, home of M. Butterfly, became the hired wife, Plan B.

Tapping the fuel gauge, Sweeney ignored orders. Flying blind,
he could've aborted, but he bombed Nagasaki anyway,
when it appeared through a curtain of clouds like a mirage.

Looking over his shoulder, the pilot who leveled Nagasaki,

saw an iridescent lightning-infused cloud rising 
faster than Hiroshima, more intense, more angry, 
at once breathtaking and ominous.

Unable to reach Iwo Jima, he crash-landed

on Yontan Field, in Okinawa, both engines, dead. 

The plane hovered on the edge of the cliff like a tired gull.

An officer shouted, You fucked up, didn't you, Chuck?

Another said We had the wrong guy flying the plane.
Even Enola Gay's pilot Paul Tibbets went a little mad.

But Sweeney, who commanded the last atomic mission, 

maintained to his dying day that he'd made the right decision.
I took no pride or pleasure in the brutality of war, 

whether suffered by my people or those of another nation. 

Every life is precious. But I felt no remorse or guilt 

that I had bombed the city where I stood.

Did we also drop evacuation leaflets, like paper doves,

or was that another story of a story told after the fact?
After Tokyo, Hiroshima, then Nagasaki. Emperor Hirohito said:
We must now bear the unbearable and endure the unendurable.
A hundred thousand gone. According to the Manhattan Project,
it was a smashing success. But Shiva was unleashed,
and a hundred thousand more burned from within.
The voices of the hibakusha sang a silent aria of grief.
Oppenheimer invoked Vishnu:
I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

No matter that the Japanese, already defeated, 

had surrendered, de facto. But we taught them

a lesson, not once, not twice, but three times

for Pearl Harbor. And we taught them again.

Again and again.

7/23/19

Published in the 2022 fall issue of 

War, Literature, & the Arts anthology (online)

Dept. of English & Fine Arts, 

United States Air Force Academy, Colorado

War, Literature & the Arts publication of War’s End

Today, on this 73rd anniversary of Hiroshima

Today, on this 73rd anniversary of Hiroshima, I can't stop weeping. It's as if all the atrocities of the world have come home to roost. Fat Man, and Little Boy. I touched the cold green casings of their brethren at Los Alamos and wept. Green, the color of life, and, hell on earth. People's shadows etched into concrete for eternity. It makes me weep now, just thinking of it. My mother's cousin was a mathematician for the Manhattan Project, so Los Alamos was one of her addresses, only the government denied its existence, so postcards to her aunt, my grandmother, were delivered from New Mexico, no address. We found this out after she had died of cancer. It was a well-kept secret. Say the names. Stallion Gate. Alamagordo. Los Alamos. Say Trinitite. Come to an understanding of that unholy fused green glass blooming in the white sands. The illusion of thousands of paper cranes floating on the breeze, like at Manzanar. I keep one by my bed to ward off dreams. A memento mori for the past that we cannot change. Nor recover from. Nor should we. It's as if the grief has settled in my breast. Today I have taken baby steps, and have begun what is called in Sweden, dostadning, or death cleaning, to decrease the burden of footprint, and self, as everything is finite. Even the veiled green tears of grief.

CROSSING THE SHOSHONES

CROSSING THE SHOSHONES

On Highway 50, said to be

the loneliest road in America,

the eyes of a coyote gleam in our headlights.

I am caught up in the web of history:

who I am, where I come from.

We climb up into Austin

crossing the Reese River,

the road to Home Ranch.

Who’d have thought this desolate valley

would harbor a child

who would work on the bomb?

We pull into the Pony Canyon motel,

fragments jogged from memory

loosened like milk teeth,

or rocks after the thaw.

9/18/93  Austin, Nevada

TRINITY

TRINITY 

from a drawing by Marsha Connell, White Sands Guardians

When Marsha drew 
rock formations at Stallion Gate,
naming them White Sands Guardians,
she knew nothing of their history
witnesses to Ground Zero, 
and the new green desert glass, trinitite—
On July 16th,1945,
the sand fused for miles
by Trinity; a destroyer of worlds,
said J. Robert Oppenheimer.
This is the place 
where Billy the Kid 
& Pancho Villa last rode
on The Trail of the Dead.

This is the place
where ghosts of the Cold War 
swarmed in hissing sands, 
where fathers and sons listened 
to the sounds of war 
growling across a cloudless sky
announce the birth 
of the nuclear age.

This is the place 
where blood stained white sands, 
and the threefold nightmare 
of a black flower bloomed,
riding across the world 
at the speed of light.   


6/91 & 7/16/92                                                                        

BLUE WINDOWS freewrite

                  

Betty's window frames are the color of the sky

Lucia starts each morning with a cigarette

The sun weaves patterns through the vigas,

the bars in the adobe walls

imprisoned sunlight

the leaves of the cottonwood

elaborate on the small breeze

and cast long slanted shadows

on the wall

Mayflies dance vertical spirals

in endless progression

like an elevated vertical infinity sign

Maybe it's because they don't live so long

they make the sign

Cathedrals of light spewer from the steeple

a sign of light flooding the room, the walls

Beyond the cottonwoods

a garden of cosmos alizarin godetias and cornflowers

Someone has just laid a lawn squares of a living carpet

the mayflies dance above it

The window in the wall with its vigas

casts ladders of light across the patio floor 
and onto the lawn

a bridge into another world

This morning I awoke in a strange house

made tea, but drank coffee instead

that familiar slow ponderous crunch 
of Betty's foot on the gravel

an old woman who spends her final days 
in this house her parents built

soon she will move to a fine new apartment on the Santa Fe river

The house is getting to be too much for her, she says.

The infrequent rain has stained the wall

with heiroglyphic code.

There is no water in the Santa Fe river

This is the end of the trail that leads to Mexico City

the mute clarion announces Sunday

Yes, today the sun also rises (to borrow a line)

I held a Pueblo pipe stem in my hand at midnight

No bowl, but as I made the proper pass from right to left arm

I felt the medicine anyway

A tuft of coarse strawberry hair—a scalp?

We introduced the notion of scalping our enemies

Who was more savage? 
The names speak for themselves

Kit Carson, Billy the Kid, Pancho Villa

They all rode into town one way or another

We arrived in a white ford with the latest technology

computerized excess

When the shadows of the cottonwood leaves

fall on the ground, they make circular patterns

like cluster of people

Teenagers line the plaza last night in tight knots

the light intersects shadow on the peach

This is like arriving next door to home 333 on an aqua door

I used to live at 333 Third Ave

My life dominated by the second prime number

or third of you count zero

Is zero a prime number or is it transparent like water,

like sly only giving the appearance of un divisibility

A cat wanders along a high wall the watertower on stilts

peers over a neighbor's fence into their private refuges

We are always seeking refuge.

Lucia and Betty talk on the island of bed amid boxes

We are four women in transition

young Michael, the only balance

Soon we will need to plan our days here, so little time

Words to know: Bering  Straits

civilization, Ice age mountains

boulders migration, mammoths, obsidian

stone age mica surplus specialize cahokia

an endless progression of shops up canyon road

one gallery after another in all the same hues

art for sale in cloying pastels

the written word

should be clean and bare

clear as light

firm as stone

two word are not

as good as one

            —anon

Two blocks from this palace where I sleep

where Delgado crosses the Santa Fe River

is where the Rosenbergs were arrested says Lee Rosenthal

Tomorrow we go to Los Alamos

the cottonwoods where the Manhattan Project was born

I am chasing my own ancestors across New Mexico

Last night we had rain, today the cottonwood leaves 

have that preternatural rustle of fall in the air 

a state of being

The peaches are gone from the windowsill 

I miss their elegancy against the cerulean sashes 

I've bought Betty nectarines as replacements

though I know it won't look the same 

Today we go to the pueblos

They say rainbows signify hope

over Frijoles Canyon 
Clouds dressed in salmon hues
four corners for rainbows 
lightning striking the earth

9/1990 (not sure why I put 1991 as Hotel La Flnda, Taos is 1990)

PROGRESS

PROGRESS

The story is unlikely:
a dream of white walls, oak sills
twin beds, the north-facing window,
a radiator, Bing Crosby croons from the stereo,
a deluge of words that make no sense:
snake betrayal of the earth.
I must have known something, but how?
Like when the Challenger blew up, I saw something
from the Möbius strip teaser of time, convoluted
amoebas blossoming against a blue-mantled sky.
Tell me why we share dreams even now,
on opposite sides of the earth
with day and night between us?
I worry about where Einstein sleeps
and write elegies for the dead.
The Chernobyls, t he Manhattan projects haunt me—
my cousin helped to build the bomb.
The age of enlightenment burns words right off the page.
There's more work to do, I'm not sure what it is.
Think of the secrets locked inside stone,
where does the memory of the earth sleep?
Gaia. No wonder she trembles,
shaking parasitic cities from her skin.
I've planted a stone in the garden for you.
What else is there to do?
They say the role of the poet is to reinvent the myths.
It's not the accumulation of knowledge,
but something deeper, akin to the group mind of Neanderthals
born with the mythology of an entire species intact.
We work with a genetic cuneiform,
and have no rosetta stone to decode,
only vague hunches we call by the name of poetry.
What do we leave our children—
is this truly the last of the line—
venerable dinosaurs of the modern age?
Maybe none of this is real: we're fictional
characters, suspicious we don't exist.

11/89

LIGHTING THE ELECTRIC FIRE

       Runners dressed in skins carried embers
       in moss-lined pouches to the next hearth.
        —Jane Walsh Reilly, 1893—1987

In the dark-paneled hall
of my grandmother's house,
mother-of-pearl light switchesó
the kind you push in & out,
resounded like sprung mouse traps
& light flooded the room.
The moment after one pushed in the switch,
wires inside the light bulb glowed red
like embers from earlier fires
to keep back the wolves and the night.

It was the woman's job
to keep the hearth fires lit.
To let it go out was to let death
come into the house,
my grandmother said.

Inside the heart of the light bulb,
between horn-like filaments,
beside the finely-coiled spring,
a smoldering spark from the first hearth
is locked inside because all atoms
are recycled except the ones we've split.

The white hair of my grandmother
as she bends to read
throws off its own aura of light.

8/1986
1992 Green Fuse
        Apostrofe! (in Ukrainian)
1986-88 Falling to Sea Level
1987 Marin Poetry Review
1986 More Than Words, CPITS Anthology

AT THE CENTER OF A BIRD'S BACK EINSTEIN SLEEPS

My aunt says the millennium is at hand.

She strokes my cheek, wants me to believe, be saved,

reunited "upstairs" when the time comes,

while on T.V., a modern-day Elmer Gantry preaches a concoction

   of science and myth—anthropomorphic bible-thumping.

It's the tenth anniversary of Jonestown, Greneda.

I have not received communion since the Vietnam war.

For this, I will spend an unspecified amount of time in purgatory,

my aunt says. But there are graver sins I have committed

which I tell no one. I watch re-runs of Kennedy shot over and over.

After 25 years, grief unfurls anew and I am ten years old again.

The sacred volcanos of Peru and Guatemala are littered with corpses.

In the Peten Itza jungle, near the sacred city of Tikal, saraguato monkeys howl,

making no distinction between exiled guerillas, and the invading army—

Uzis bought with U.S. dollars. AK-47's. In the jungle the Cold War continues.

In the ceiba trees scarlet macaws scream warning to thrumming insects.

Oblivious leaf-cutter ants carve low tunnels through the underbrush.

I never get used to the guns. In the highlands I never saw boys or men—

only women and babies waiting under the volcanic shadows of Atitlán.

On a shining path deep in the Andes, friends carrying medical supplies

are stopped by leftist Sendero Luminoso terrorists on horseback

who let them go when they answer each question right.

Having passed the test, they feel reborn. Their path leads forward still.

Like with Kennedy, I cannot erase or help the blood

of lawyer Manuel Febres-Flores migrating to the sea.

My Peruvian friend said don't look, but it was too late

as we sped off through the Chorillos tunnel to safety.

The TV news fills in the details. He went to buy a newspaper.

His crime was that he was a good lawyer on the "wrong" side.

I have committed this to memory, and I have no words

for bearing witness to the casual departure of life.

There are no front lines in the jungle, the cordilleras, or here.

The Japanese woman warns me never to sleep

at the foot of the bed, or I will have terrible dreams.

During this harvest of apocryphal nights, I learn I have "thin boundaries"

because I dream of snipers in the jungle, and wake up on the floor

crawling toward the safety of closets. I worry about borderline

madness but there are those in power who don't dream. Ever.

Instead, they bring us nightmares. Names of horses.

Before the attack on Hiroshima, an ex-pilot boasted

how he dropped warning leaflets written in English.

He said they were like falling snow, or "window,"

the metal filaments they used to avoid electronic surveillance

while flying in enemy space. He said they named the bombs

and planes after children: Fat Man, Little  Boy, Enola Gay.

I wasn't born yet when this happened

but I keep making origami cranes to heal something in myself.

There are thin boundaries between water, air, and space.

Point in time. Crushed beneath the burden of air, fish drown.

On the swing set, I heard angels striking matches in dry summer grass.

The Hibakusha, the first to witness bright plasma clouds and shadow

are nearly all gone now. At the center of a bird's back Einstein sleeps.

Antichrist arrives in the form of invasion.

When the last condor dies, who will strip it clean of flesh

and make a quena flute from the feathers of its wings?

1986
rev. 1987 & 1989

THE WEDDING PARTY

—for Brian & Nancy, 11/23/85

Late afternoon wedding.

The courtyard of Mission San Juan Capistrano

harbors no swallows--only bleak mud nests.

On the bare tree, the one white pigeon stirs the flock

and like grey leaves bursting into flight, they circle and bank

as guests enter the narrow timbered adobe chapel,

whitewashed walls lean heavily toward the sea,

dim green light broken into patterns by the windows of saints.

A white satin carpet is unrolled for Brian & Nancy.

Behind a flurry of veils, the kiss, the rings we can’t see.

The guitar strings whisper, the mariachi band readies itself.

And the final words of the padre, “In 50 years

I will come to bless you again. Look for a small white bird.

All this recorded on video; seafoam and dark shadows.

As the last chord fades, we leave the church

barely able to look at each other

but our white-knuckled fingers and damp palms

reassure us of our existence.

John mimics my left-handed sign-of-the-cross

The nuns said it was the sign of the devil.

Our car horns stir the pigeon flock

into another cloud of frenzied flight.

We run the red lights. Cars at weddings

and funerals have right-of-way.

At the San Clemente Beach Club

the wedding party reconvenes.

In this bastion of America, pinstripe suits

mingle with down jackets and nikes.

I imagine behind each face, a mask,

behind each palm tree, a dark stranger.

Each day John pins to his breast

the lapis heart I gave him.

In ritual there is comfort.

But this makes me uneasy.

Someone sings Danny Boy

& Brian’s mother cries

the same way my aunt does.

The storm front pushes down on the sea

until the horizon is swallowed.

We take armfuls of red carnations out into the night

& slide drunkenly between Brian & Nancy’s sheets

as if this were our honeymoon instead.

Dark petals stain the sheets & the rain comes down.

11/24/85
San Clemente

SIXTH OF AUGUST

SIXTH OF AUGUST

The personality of the dead woman in the storage room escapes
from boxes of silk scarves, photographs, letters
cellulose toys, yellow mother of pearl buttons and cloth scraps.
Inside her white plastic purse;
a checkbook, unclaimed raffle tickets,
a tiny snapshot of a girl who still sends her love;
an envelope dated 1937,
some eight-cent stamps and a life insurance policy.

On this 40th anniversary of Light,
I pull stamps of Einstein and Eisenhower apart.
Glued on top of a glib Eisenhauer grinning seven times
a haunted Einstein broods in purple; the color of mourning.
Beneath them, postage stamps of Apollo on the moon,
black-wreathed earth against the sun;
the birth of Man in space.

When I was three, the linoleum to cover the stairs
was put in the storage room to change it from green to red,
my uncle told me. And so it did.
I admired the miracles that happened in darkness.
In that same darkness, copper pennies
dropped into the piggybank turned into steel.
Dressed in khaki-green, my uncle tossed me into the air
and the known world spun past my forehead.
He held a suitcase of darkness in his hand.

Now, I've gone and brought the dead woman's things into light.
A photograph of her husband holding a silver-plated trophy
by the tall grey horse at Longacre track:
He stares at me with such frankness, that with his passing
I feel the loss of an intimate stranger.
The bent and tarnished trophy rests in thick dust.

When I wear the clothing of the dead,
they see glimpses of light again.
The poet's shirt gives me strange dreams
but I forget the words by morning.

Rotted with age, the boxes of yarn
in this half-light makes tufts like the manes
of cloth horses I ride in my dreams
where the landscape grows wilder with each visit.

August 6, 1985
rev. 1986

1987 San Francisco Bay Guardian, 2nd Place
         Thread Winding the Loom, CPITS anthology
         The Paper
 1995 Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age, ( version 2, below)

 see my post,  Atomic Ghost

HOME RANCH

HOME RANCH
                       —for Geoff Davis

1. The ancestral path led to the adobe ruin;

a buckled porch shifted its ghostly weight.

This was Wild Bill Walsh's house,

& later, it was Julia's.

When the liquor ran dry,

he drove his truck into the town of Ione

and sold it for a five-gallon barrel of whiskey

& a good game of cards—or so the story goes.

They said that when he wasn't drinking,

he was a fine blacksmith.

After a hundred years, his handiwork, still in use—

I fondle the door hinges, the gate latches,

even the twisted juniper beams in the barn

preserved by the dry desert air.

Birds flew among the rafters to open sky.

A half-century of melting snows

dissolved the adobe into rich chocolate streaks

on the whitewashed walls.

2. At family gatherings there was talk of incest.

First cousins, my grandmother said.

From that union of Wild Bill and Julia,

one daughter sat in the corner by the stove

sewing with imaginary needle & thread.

What wasn't mentioned was the other

became a scientist. Jornada del Muerte.

Alamagordo was like Home Ranch,

Los Alamos, White Sands, New Mexico,

& Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Pioneer names for home.

Code name: Manhattan Project.

July 16, 1945, Fat Man.

Oppenheimer's trinitite, green desert glass

from ground zero was the dowry for my cousin Mary.

Ghosts of the Cold War swarming in the singing sand,

& the sound of war growling across a cloudless sky

were what survived her.

I spent eternal moments under my school desk

during bomb drills, thinking of Russia and Cuba,

not knowing Mary was implicated in all this too.

3. She let her thoughts go out the same way they came in

through the ruin of the back door.

What she wanted was to feel was his rough hand on her skin,

& in the ruined kitchen they'd couple in the alkali dust,

their bodies, stone mills to grind the earth to powder.

On the porch roof, a baby bird,

mistaking me for his mother,

ravened at the edge of his nest,

the red lining of his mouth, a wound.

I sat on the far side of the old well

watching a cloud cross a minute patch of sky

in the dark eye of water, to worn out to cry.

I was composing a letter in my head—

what I should have said, but . . .

Tired of waiting for god-knows-what,

I knew he'd laid aside the hammer & tongs &

cracked open another bottle in darkness.

What could survive that?

4/85
rev. 3/90

WITH THESE WORDS: REDEMPTION

WITH THESE WORDS: REDEMPTION

All right, it's over. With these words
I redeem the human body.
We rise to the surface like parasitic fish,
leap clear of the water and fall heavily back
 to shake loose from the depths
 the snot in our lungs.
Light, like faith healing these cancerous bodies,
 brings us forth into day.

In a school drill, we crouched under our desks,
shielding our eyes and necks with chubby arms.
We sat in rows on the playground to watch the flash
drain color from the sky
when they tested the bombs at Jackass Flats.

At the hospital, the black toilet seat
is split like the thighs of some hairy sex.
A nurse keeps me from falling down
the long, cool tubes where consciousness
is an escaped bubble trapped in the bends of a pipe.
The coriolis effect on water swirls it to the right.
The opposite is true south of the equator
but there are flaws in every system, including the weather.
Remember that durning nuclear winter.

The frozen wings of starched hospital gowns
 threaten to carry us off,
but the nurse brings in the choke chains
 and we tumble from air,
 tumble from water,
 tumble from grace.
 Virgil, Prospero, Icarus—
we're too close to the light.
 Return us to the waxed plain
 of checkered hospital floors
with beds arranged according to patterns
where an enormous game of chess is in progress
and the beds are the only pawns left playing.

8/84
Falkirk Center, San Rafael


Another old ascii riddled rescue piece. Date? I'm making them all 1/180. Hopefully I'll find my lost MSS binder. Otherwise there's no hard copy of most of my work for 2 decades. Yikes.

Miracle, I found two typed versions for lines.

ELEGY FOR MARY WALSH

ELEGY FOR MARY WALSH
The atomic bomb was developed under the code name of the Manhattan Project.
Those involved with the project died within three decades of cancer.
—to Jane Walsh Reilly

Grandma said:
Julia took the kids:
Mary, her sister, and the boy twins
to Colorado for a better education.

There wasn't much in Nevada,

and there was some trouble with the marriage.

My grandmother's half-cousin Bill was a handsome man.

He was the number-one son

and ran the Home Ranch in Austin, Nevada.

Julia O'Leary came out from Bantry to marry Bill.

The family was deadset against the marriage,

They were first cousins, you know.

And Mary's sister was brilliant too

but she was institutionalized in Denver.

Darwin's parents were first cousins too.

There was something off about his sister as well.

It works that way with marriages between first cousins

genius and idiot: flip sides of the same coin.

Maybe that's the Almighty's way of keeping things separate.

It was during the war years, I remember,

Mary was chosen right out of high school

to work on a secret project for the government.

When they were testing for mathematics and science,

Mary got one of the highest scores in the country

and she went to work back east.

It wasn't until later we found out

it was the Manhattan Project

one of the government's best kept secrets.

No one knew anything about it.

We didn't hear from her for years,

and learned of her death announcement

when it appeared in the papers.

Here I was, first cousins to her,

and even I didn't know.

There was one short line about her work.

I heard, all who worked on it died,

but no one blamed the project.

The first time I saw Mary at Home Ranch

was back in the '20s the little toddler

standing by the adobe wall

and Julia talking, talking, talking

I was dazed because that child,

her voice was like a bell.

She was so perfect,

I thought I'd seen an angel.

And Julia, looking at me so quizzically

That was the pity of it. I didn't explain.

And her, Mary, clinging to her mother's skirts

as if she'd done something wrong,

crying hysterically,

Mommy, mommy, I'm not a bad girl. Mommy.

9/83