Peter Harris

RADIOACTIVE BATTLEFIELDS OF THE '90'S

This may be the place for the best talk,
but it isn't the best place to talk
about the little puff your eyes can't see.

Too many conventions, too few of you.
Your reasonable expectation of pleasure.
The traditional uncrossed gulf between utterance

and response stretching around us like the desert
stretched around the Iraqis and the Americans
in the first war where nuclear weapons became "conventional."

The first war where tanks (M1-A1s) were armored
with uranium and armed with uranium bullets.
Why? Because it's the Hard Stuff. The Hardest.

Then there's the Maginot Line of Incredulity
and the Great Wall of Jargon to cross before we meet
at the oasis where we'd never expect to hear the words

"pyrophoric," or "aerosolized" or "ancephalic."
When the U-238 isotope in the bullet hits metal
at faster than the sound of these words, it pyros,

then aerosols its own bonsai Hiroshima.
"Ancephalic" is what they've been calling Kuwaitis
and Iraqis born without their brains. Lots of them.

As for our boys? They breathe. Who knows
how much they breathed? One micron, a particle too small
ever to leave your lungs, will home deliver

a thousand times your annual supply. Desert Storm
won't be over for two-hundred-fifty-thousand years.
I'm telling you today because I'm not a columnist.

Because I believe in the subjective multiplicity of the soul.
Not just Sibyl and The Three Faces of Eve,
but the Trinity, the Quaternity, the unnumbered characters

inside Dickens, the one note I might strike
to make this story of the secret poisoning
of the planet seem real as the mockingbird's scream.

For Louis Sinclair