August 6

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“Go get dressed. You’re no man for this army!”
I went, thanking for the first time that crook
In my spine that had stopped me buck naked
From buck privacy, taken me back to you 
After a three-hour, not a three-year, separation. 

Together we heard the celebration: 
Hiroshima Wiped Out! With one bomb! 
With one bomb! Now the war will have to end!
We celebrated with the rest. Celebrated the bomb,
Celebrated rejection, celebrated your birthday, my love. 

For forty years now, to celebrate your birthday
We’ve had to celebrate the bomb, but on 
A sliding scale: from first exuberance 
To slow knowing to terror now. Your poor birthday,
Growing on an opposing scale, tonight 
Gets only a bad movie as celebration. 

The spine that bought my rejection 
Has cost me plenty since in pain, but none
Like that of the bomb I failed to feel as pain. 

“The crowning savagery of war,” J. Reuben Clark
Called those bombs. But we dismissed him:
Old and embittered. I’m old and bitter now.
I call him back to witness—against me, 
Against all who would not hear, who do not hear.

The speed of light squared! That bomb still lives, 
Mushrooming in our memories, a ghost in the galaxy 
A thousand times alive in its sleek rude brood 
Begotten of that equation 
On technology, the mushroom prefiguring 
And portending, Cassandra-like, the progeny 
Expanding at the square of the speed of light. 

Ah, love, let us be true . . . The ebb and flow 
Are sucking and swelling to a tidal wave! 
Our leaders run like children 
Down the sand in the deep ebb sucked out 
By the coming wave, like children down the sand 
To pluck for their crowns the shining baubles 
Bared before the wave. 

We love. That may be all we do or have 
When the wave bursts over us. 
And if the voice of apocalypse be not heard 
We must at least let the silent waves of our love 
Be known: We love.