The Day the Clock Stopped

THE DAY THE CLOCK STOPPED

Nagasaki, Japan

The day the clock stopped,

Those whose names had been inscribed

In the Book of Death,

Thursday, August 9, 1945,

In one instant, they no longer existed.

Unspooling, life had unwound, desultory worm.

They were working in the field, grinding at the mill…

One was taken, another left.

The schoolboy sitting on the steps vaporized in a single burst of a thousand white flashes, his existence now only a memory fired in cement…

The factory worker, blown backward and upward against the wall, falling to the floor and under a fallen pillar, her skull cracking open like an egg, the huge roof blasted away entirely…walls collapsing inward, exposing a wasteland trodden completely flat by a hurricane foot…

The postman upswept, smashed downward, his bicycle twisting into a pretzel… sloughing off, his skin melting like cheese under extreme heat…swelling to twice its normal size, his face, eyes pinched closed…blood streaming out of his ears and nose, bubbling frothily from his mouth…his belly split open, intestines welling up like rice boiling in a pot…

The schoolteacher sucked out from inside the door, swung violently against an exploded tree…her eyes pushed out like pendant cherries…unmoving now, her dead body a white potato ball, peelings uncurling, red flesh showing underneath…sitting in a welter of picks, fire hooks, shovels, houses like fallen chairs, cadavers like charring logs…

The soldier still standing, petrified, blackened, his uniform fully burned away…smoldering amidst steel frames bereft of walls, smashed furniture, roof tiles like confetti, telegraph poles snapped in two, dangling electric cables, twisted train tracks, smoking corpses igniting spontaneously into flame…or bloated, purplish, popping up and out of the water…

The mother nursing her child when the window burst, peppering her with glass buckshot, spearing her fatally through the eye…her last glimpse, thick, heavy black and yellow smoke drawn upward into a geyser of smoke and dust rising rapidly into the dense sky…the sun a reddish-brown disc…

A broken clock retrieved by survivors had been memorialized—

Crystal of human intelligence, a living stone, ticking when the atomic shockwave had folded it in two,

Today it hangs in a glass display—a statue unperturbed by tumult, finality of a royal emblem, for all practical purposes, inert.

For Tetsuya Koshiishi

Broken Wall Clock, Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, Japan

Three Moon Poems

How dark the sky…

How dark the sky,

Bright the water

When silver fish

Reflect the moon.

NOCTURNE

I am a lover of the moon and silence,

Silence milky as the moon,

Moon radiant as silence.

Silence is silver fish in black water,

Moon, bright flour and hot yeast,

Rolled into a fist,

Exhaling as it rises.

Push night against day,

Leave a small opening

—the moon.

Feed the wind

So it lies quietly,

Rising with effort

—silence.

Faraway plume of white smoke,

Twilight crossing the border,

Comet in exclamation,

I see, not hear.

Heartbeats quickened by grief,

Engine roar beyond the wall,

Secrets spoken in a dream,

I hear, not see.

Blinded by the moon, I call out in my heart to silence striding into blackness beyond earshot.

THE MOON AND RIVER AND SILENCE

                                      

Guided by the moon,

Traveling downriver,

I am enraptured by silence.

All I hear is, delicate, song of my oar

As it dips gently, emerges,

Streamlets, bright notes running down the edge

Of the blade, silver spoon, glistening.

I listen to the moon…

River, warbling bird…

Illumined by silence.

Crickets dare not crack their knuckles.

Moon over Lake Superior