High Noon at Los Alamos

To turn a stone with its white squirming underneath, to pry the disc from the sun’s eclipse—white heat coiling in the blinded eye: to these malign necessities we come from the dim time of dinosaurs who crawled like breathing lava from the earth’s cracked crust, and swung their tiny heads above the lumbering tons of flesh, brains no bigger than a fist clenched to resist the white flash in the sky the day the sun-flares pared them down to relics for museums, turned glaciers back, seared Sinai’s meadows black—the ferns withered, the swamps were melted down to molten mud, the cells uncoupled, recombined, and madly multiplied, huge trees toppled to the ground, the slow life there abandoned hope, a caterpillar stiffened in the grass. Two apes, caught in the act of coupling, made a mutant child who woke to sunlight wondering, his mother torn by the huge new head that forced the narrow birth canal. As if compelled to repetition and to unearth again white fire at the heart of matter—fire we sought and fire we spoke, our thoughts, however elegant, were fire from first to last—like sentries set to watch at Argos for the signal fire passed peak to peak from Troy to Nagasaki, triumphant echo of the burning city walls and prologue to the murders yet to come—we scan the sky for that bright flash, our eyes stared white from watching for the signal fire that ends the epic—a cursed line with its caesura, a pause to signal peace, or a rehearsal for the silence.