Atom Fish: Prologue
Aspects:
opposites.
Invisible from where I sit,
you insist
these happenings
are real, their
odd combinations
can create anything –
china doll,
oak tree, elephant,
fish –
red banana,
beetles,
jasmine rice –
a blue orb
swirled with white –
*
Hydrogen bombs are sometimes called atomic fish,
while atom bombs are atomic matches. The atomic fish
are the particles which form all atoms.
There are only three particles – neutrons, protons, and electrons.
Two or more of them get together to form any atom.
*
Atom Fish: 1
On my dirty harbor beach
a half mile
from the sewage treatment plant,
a mile from the Superfund
river that
flows through
it is almost safe
for swimming.
They want
to build a river walk
and a boat house-
(fine if you don’t fall in)
Not
like when I was five, we all thought nothing
of bathing in a soup of laughter and PCBs
at East & West Beach
Not
like when my father was a kid
and jumped into the muck hole
at Sullivan’s Ledge to save the poor dog
who fell in
to the quarry –
It was a sunny day.
Adam
in the guise of
a slippery fish
flopped up on the dock
near the boats
and waited to die.
*
like fish in or out of water. A fisherman never weighs his catch
under water, where the buoyancy would cut the weight.
*
Atom Fish: 2
Memory:
a rough rope net,
hands reeking of diesel,
buckets of brine,
salt air –
the bent ends
of cigarettes pushed down
in brown sand.
A car barrels
over the causeway. Under black
water, silver gills
glint.
*
They weigh less after they enter the nucleus
of an atom than when they are outside.
*
Atom Fish: 3
Is it that my eyes are older
or that I’ve grown
more of them?
Was it me who changed,
or did the sea floor
turn inside-out,
the water become the air, the sheen
of purple green oil
glistening on the surface
of the harbor,
on the cillia
of our lungs?
Atom Fish:
when you shed
your heavy scales,
slipped through
the meniscus
did the mercury in your belly
float or sink?
*
in atoms makes the H-bomb. The mass they lose
in forming helium turns mostly into heat. This heat
may be hotter even than the centers of stars.
*
Atom Fish: 4
On land, one generation removed
from child-uncles crouched
under desks when alarm bells rang,
we were
the last of those
who scanned the ground for shelter
when the planes flew overhead,
who giggling,
scuttled by
fallout signs
they’d nailed
to the doors of our schools, our
voices hollow and pale,
lighter than air,
the first
to take for granted a legacy
that could sear us
with the heat
of stars.