Rhadha Marcum

Issue #
7
September 27, 2015

In the Making


                      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.

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