"The Idol."
"In the kitchen, a big black blur
turns its blind face to stare.
I let it look, I'm nothing, seven,
among the props of bankruptcy, the pen, and banker,
and pale ledger where grandma is turning to stone under two
slow oars of a ceiling fan.
Big as a houseboat in her slip, she
sits in the fiery block of red that is a leather armchair,
and watches the capitals of Europe fall
again in the fires of the TV screen,
while trucks boil down I-40 to where the atom bomb is parked
out in the desert near Tonopah.
When they dig that geyser out of the ground,
it does not bend, or nod.
It clings to the horizon, pale, intent, shy, proud.
At night, it smolders in the slot between two silos
while Ely burns like a lit fuse between its two
beautiful, small black hills.
And looking up from the fire, in the hold of the big, black, iron
warship of her stove, a groan rises
in the flue of grandma's throat, like smoke off a lamp wick.
And her heart, down on one knee, puts down the other."