(Imagining a sailor who watched the Bikini Atoll Bombing is talking to a young diver who is swimming Bikini Atoll’s wrecks)
I trudge through black trees
lining the park in prison-bar rows,
their branches kimonos bombed on sky —
skeletal fingers begging for birds.
After the blossoming, comes the loss.
Traffic light — flash of light. Wet-suited fish,
you dart across my screen’s aquarium,
hover over Saratoga…
Your Bikini Atoll is paradise,
world’s best private museum, glorious.
Drill presses. Helmets. Pedestals. Plates.
Zigzag the bridge where Yamamoto began
Pearl Harbour, “Niitaka Yama Nobure!”
Circle gun-hulls that shot kamikazes.
For a live bomb in a bomb bay,
picture a saved plane.
I met a soldier on an aircraft carrier
who said, “As a boy, paradise bored me.
I used to burn wings off flies to see
ugly mangled bodies try to fly.”
Kids with magnifying glasses rile sunlight.
Scientists H-bombed sixty prized ships.
There is no shape to shadows,
only a sense of the bored wanting fire.
My young body floats into my brain —
Baker’s photo of a sun burnt, shirtless arm.
Elbows up. Sailors in a row look
through binoculars, as if this were simply
a shark swimming by, not a carcass
lit into killing ash.
You flicker through dark tunnels, kick
rust-spackle, float over star-fish guns.
Doorways are gaping wounds.
Strange grows here — car-sized coral,
sharks missing dorsal fins, breath
hissing in tubes. Drop miles below
into the dark crater. My prison.
My only visitor is a flicker child
in my ex-wife’s womb — a here, not here,
embryo like an egret who rises
from the grove, spins with wings wide
for a minute, only to be shot down.
I, too, am a beast of history’s deep hole.