English

Small birds exit skies
Much the way smoke, or Kleenex
Up a shop-vac flies.

*

Believing each and every color
of the sky should get a name

MR. PARKER. ...If we accept the principle of acceptable risk in radiation exposure, and there is no alternative today, instead of black and white, we have only infinite gradation of gray from perhaps a black relating to significant over-exposure, grading down but never reaching white. It is beyond our wits to quantify such a scale. Yet the attempt has to be made at least to define bands of gray.

There will be through the course of the years
a very slow build-up , he said.
One knows the final answer only some 10,
20, or 30 years from now . He said, Perhaps
by the time the deposit becomes a hazard
the true permissible levels will be known,
and the word permissible was downy
as fine snow. It is rather easy to show , he said,
an undesirable tendency to concentrate where
least desired . As though Jack Frost had touched
his mind. The obvious hazard is not always —
the flakes started falling in earnest — one might

Women,
take off your
dresses
and undergarments.
You babies,
crawl naked
in the grass.
Lie down all of you
under the August sky,
and nobody ask.
Questions alarm
and weaken

One can picture the entire population of Richland lying unclothed on the ground for one day. There would be about 25 identifiable particles in contact with skin; not more than three would be in an activity type range that could produce a significant effect; not more than one would probably produce an effect.... At the worst, there would be a small necrotic area, perhaps comparable with the effect of plunging a lighted match head to the skin. My best guess is that this would not happen in one day"s contact with the hottest known offsite particle....

Flakes emitted from the process stack
could be discerned by the eye
the way one might hear the taps
of countless leather soles
treading a busy bus lot
and yet not attend them —

not notice their drift and fall.
Say the click of my mother"s heels
as she pushed one baby in a carriage
and pulled another by the hand
through the nearby village in August —
as it snowed radioruthenium.
She wouldn"t know to listen.

If only she"d thought to ask
why snow fell that summer.

Augeus"s vast herds of cattle were divine
but their shit was earthly,
and divinely abundant.

The stench hung over the valley,
palpable. Nobody
waded into the fouled stable

without drowning.
This gave Hercules his idea
to divert two rivers,

the Alpheus and the Peneus,
and sluice the filth away,
which he finished in a single day.

Then he slew King Augeus
to remind us the world belongs
to gods and kings,

that exacting justice is worthier
than atoning for sins.

Although it's likely you're on your own
at this moment in this city of three million
reading the poems of Traherne,
and there was no one till you lit your lamp,
the kingdom of childhood keeps being founded
in his voice and his seeing,
which are a sort of birth. A birth goes on
in the dark of a poor family, or a mother alone.
Then comes the small bright circle of the faces:
lover pores over sleeping loved one, parent over child
in their enclosure we name home,
a hut in the plain so bare there's not a tongue

How do you explain why elephants
appear to move their unwieldy hulks
with greater dignity than most humans do
in their finest moments,
as if they had evolved beyond wanting
anything but what they have?
Why does the field begin to ripple
before the wind arrives in whispers,
as if there were a communication,
as if the landscape were poorly dubbed,
and we weren"t expected to notice?
What butterfly does not dart away from us
as if it could sense our latent cruelties,
and yet return to check and double-check?