"The Last Version."
"Far away from here the Rio Grande
is being threaded down its tracks,
tugging its little trail of noise and light.
The tracks are a scar in a leveled stair.
There's no up here, there's no down,
there's only near and far and farther.
The sun leaks across the horizon at dawn
and is sponged up at dusk by distance.
That is our most lavish natural resource.
Except for the bomb.
There is the bomb.
At night, if the wand of the Geiger counter
is held into the wind on the hotel's flat roof,
you can hear the spit and hiss of fallout.
It's the voice of radium released from earth.
And what must that be like, after centuries sealed up
in the marrow?
The giddy stretch, the sinuous unlocking,
the lift and catapult out of matter
into the huge, wobbly, weightless tonnage
of the explosion.
The detonation has always sounded like a sob of relief.
I can see it from here.
It looks like a baby's rattle, the glittering
bulb of that blast.
And now you can see me.
I am sitting, typing by the window.
I am a thin woman wearing a flowered house dress.
Perhaps you now wonder who I am.
I'm nobody.
I'm the voiceover.
I'm the writer.
That is my hand on the rattle of the bomb.
And this is my story.
I was poor.
I wrote.
I killed myself."