The Planet Krypton

Outside the window the McGill smelter

sent a red dust down on the smoking yards of copper,

on the railroad tracks’ frayed ends disappeared

into the congestion of the afternoon. Ely lay dull

and scuffed: a miner’s boot toe worn away and dim,

while my mother knelt before the Philco to coax

the detonation from the static. From the Las Vegas

Tonapah Artillery and Gunnery Range the sound

of the atom bomb came biting like a swarm

of bees. We sat in the hot Nevada dark, delighted,

when the switch was tripped and the bomb hoisted

up its silky, hooded, glittering, uncoiling length;

it hissed and spit, it sizzled like a poker in a toddy.

The bomb was no mind and all body; it sent a fire

of static down the spine. In the dark it glowed like the coils

of an electric stove. It stripped every leaf from every

branch until a willow by a creek was a bouquet

of switches resinous, naked, flexible, and fine.

Bathed in the light of KDWN, Las Vegas,

my crouched mother looked radioactive, swampy,

glaucous, like something from the Planet Krypton.

In the suave, brilliant wattage of the bomb, we were

not poor. In the atom’s fizz and pop we heard possibility

uncorked. Taffeta wraps whispered on davenports.

A new planet bloomed above us; in its light

the stumps of cut pine gleamed like dinner plates.

The world was beginning all over again, fresh and hot;

we could have anything we wanted.

Source: The Dig (University of Illinois Press, 1992)