Song & Error

          Into multiple-launch-surface, anti-tank missiles

Swarmed through numbered bank accounts

          Like Ovid’s seething knotted seed of frog-slime,

Which not seldome attracted by the sun falls

          In little frogs with the rain; when it also rained  

Radionuclides, strontium, caesium, & iodine,

          Over river & clay, & over the poet’s Black Sea

Exile, before the prevailing winds blew them all

          Across Europe from Chernobyl (jewel of a name

That means black stalks & tasted newly of metal),

          & I was in your room trying to build a fire.

Wet branches breaking, those were your breaths

          Ripped out of the air. What was it hiding you

So that at every hour’s dusk I startled on you

          Where you lay, nearly resigned in the talons

Of your most personal shape? Something still

          Obdurate, still wild as the horned lark

Rising from its nest at the hunter’s feet.

          I didn’t allow you to speak what I didn’t know

To ask. As far as the bolted iron door to adust

          I could have followed, to watch the way

You put on your flame like sweetness

          Wearing the skin of a lion, & there kept

My vigil mild while bones leached minerals

          & cell walls ruptured. It isn’t you

          Of ash, but your same small jeweled hand

Belonging to a Roman matron that I see,

          Its livid reach forth the black igneous rock.

Too late to retrieve the truth, too late not to

          Have been like the alchemist who, lowered by rope

Into the volcano, feeling the sharp concussion

          Of heat, reported his own eyes saw olive groves

          What can I make of this? Oh, what am I to make?