"The Planet Krypton."
"Outside the window, the McGill Smelter sent a red dust down
on the smoking yards of copper.
On the railroad tracks, freight ends
that disappeared into the congestion of the afternoon.
Ely lay, dull and scuffed, a miner's boot toe
worn away, dim, while my mother knelt before the Philco to coax
the detonation from the static.
From the Las Vegas Tonopah Artillery and Gunnery Range,
the sound of the atom bomb came biting like a swarm of bees
while 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, and in the dark
it glowed like the coils of an electric stove.
And 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, like
something from the planet Krypton.
In the suave and brilliant wattage of the bomb,
we were not poor.
In the atoms' fizz and pop, we heard possibility uncork.
Taffeta wraps whispered on davenports.
A new planet bloomed above us, and in its light
even the stumps of cut pine gleamed like dinner plates.
The world was beginning all over again, fresh and hot.
And we could have all of it we wanted."
[APPLAUSE]
Oh, thank you.