Declassified 1962

They eat close to the surf,

laughing as water un-combs

plum threads

from a surface that flickers

quickly in and out of

sunflowers.

I wait for the sudden

sunset, postcard orange, sun-

less as it blooms.

One of the soldiers has a question.

He rubs his nose with his thumb.

Is it that silver

speck up there?

He’s in the cotton white

t-shirt you like to wear.

I fold your sleeves in a mess and press

them to my face—your

stink in the boat

seam of fabric.

“Where the Boys Are” by Connie Francis

drones from a radio speaker, her breath

mingling with the gold-

painted mesh.

They dig their feet in the sand

peaking here & there like buttercream.

Suddenly, the song

stupidly playing

breaks out

of shape, and the men

flinch

then stare

right at the sky.

Song Pulled from a 1954 National Geographic

with wires, needles, or beads of radioactive gold

It isn’t like the skin to choose transparency:

coffee too cool in a cup to blister the tongue.

When does the energy in your bone invite ghosts

to pick through your skull and touch the brain?

My coffee cools hardly hot into my palm.

Who knew the iron v’s of a linden leaf or dragonfly wing

could write through the skull and scratch the brain?

The material lifts lighter than a pencil scoring a game:

one for the iron veining your arm, a leaf, or the glassed wing of a fly.

Burn it longer than coal—more mixed in with the ash.

I won’t watch it lift like a signature from a page

or a piano wire that circles all the ships of the navy.

We burn coal and dream of more in the ash

the way alchemists always almost made gold in a lab.

And a piano wire will hum and hum for the dead.

And a remote control will protect you from the self in the mirror.

One element is now another like gold grown in a lab:

I’ve seen the gapped bridge between an oil field and the sun.

We can control a substance remotely. Like a second self in a mirror,

no sound calls to you from within the walls.

The gap between an oil rig and the inexhaustible sun

closes with words: isos (same) and topos (place).

No smoke emerges from behind the concrete walls.

Sometimes, I sense the presence of forces, unheard and unseen

from a single place. The same place. How

a beam of neutrons releases through an open lid.

Hold your breath against what you can’t hear or see:

your doctor may ask you to drink one of the vials.

Through an open lid, a beam of neutrons will release

the way the energy in a bone invites your ghost in.

Wing the thing your doctor asks. Drink. Drink.

Your body can be made again, transparent.

If

you represent a cloud,

perhaps showing it

unexpected—

soft and strong,

rapid yet

gradual,

will you look out

as if

to say:

isn’t

it just

like that?

Hawk Parable