The Moon Receding With Explosives Strapped To Its Waist
Where were you, father, at the CCC camp, sneaking into town for coffee, or in early afternoon for a beer, thinking of wife and children and how much you'd seen in your 29 years? I ask you this so many years later, when the USS Arizona still leaks a quart of oil a day into Pearl Harbor. But where were you when she was blown apart by her own black powder, and where are you now, as I try to explain that something has happened to tall buildings in our own city, a center has collapsed, bringing down the walls so easily looked through? What can I enumerate in the deaths of travelers, their planes billowing flame, the hatred of empire and its glass soul, here this time not a fleet at anchor or gun emplacements barking at the sky, but crisp office cubicles, not bunks, not long metal corridors, family photos curling in instant divorce and abandonment, with screams suffocating at the same rate as that morning you learned the names of dreadnoughts and islands and channels, this time another choked place and harbor where the dead disappear before they can be seen dying, the names of God incinerated on lips already gone.