Three Poems by Michael Lista
Here, as promised in a previous post which contains my conversation with poet Michael Lista, are three of his poems, destined to appear in a collection called Bloom, to be published by Anansi in the not too distant future. Bloom refers to Leopold. Louis Slotin was a Canadian scientist who worked and died on the Manhattan Project. The poems detail events which took place in Slotin’s life on May 21, 1946 :
Af t e r
another, let’s do it
the way heads of state or revered rear admirals reference
their rivals; as if we’d only known each other by
reputation,
as a rumour in the other’s classified reports,
or as a cardiac blip on
a radar’s clock-swept
screen. Let’s do it the way the Enola Gay boys did––
with a wink, a wary tip of the hat, and a weary arc
across the night into the centre of the century.
And if you overhear people speak of our split,
listen for the schismatic overtones
of the word as applied to physics, specifically
fission: how when an
atom’s centre smashes and cracks,
new light explodes from matter’s collapse,
a contagious backlash that slaps
neighbours from their paths,
exciting each moment, each moment exciting
further mutiny against its form
until finally, fully free, the gantry of our obsolescence
gives, and blooms its incandescence,
sucking breath from the chests of rubber neckers.
L o u i s S l o t i n a s
t h e A l u m i n u m M o u n t a i n G i r l
for Josh Guthrie
hourglass.
We started to sink through a hole in the desert which hissed
us in
Past its event horizon to an identical
Los Alamos, upon which we landed
Unhurt but instantly amnesiac. As the sucking restarted we
remembered
How many woozy eons we’d been
sifting from instant to identical
Instant, siphoned past deck chairs and terriers and Mameluke
swords.
Slotin would be handling some
black ball
When I’d smile and the suction would start.
When I realize how
many times that has been said I said,
And that you have to
grin through its retelling I want to disappear.
And then that everafter of inertia, as if reeling from an
awkward anecdote,
And that whisper at our feet, like an orchestra of crickets
snickering
Before we began to sink through
another second hand-in-hand
Down that glass canal, as if being reincarnated as
ourselves.
L o u i s S l o t i n ’ s L a s t W o r d s
for Amy Benkard Rose
Oppenheimer turns through the wind from the driver’s seat:
No you aren’t you’ll
be fine son trust me.
Oppenheimer’s tie a babbling
alphabet of hieroglyphs.
Yes cicadas are perishing in their hulls of sound.
Yes field mice are dying in their narrows underground.
Yes the pink stamps of Johanna’s heels which flash
Rose when she tip-toes, waving from our doorway
Are perishing, as are her borrowed hands,
Her lips, tomorrow, and the planetary tufts
Of dust that pluft up from her sandals in the sun.
Yes even the moon hangs thanatonic on its hook.
And though the night goes on
The insubstantial physicist, faded to a rack,
Speaks the words that would become his epitaph:
But I am yes and only yes entrances me but
Yes I am I am Robert
yes I am yes