It’s not every day you meet
a Los Alamos scientist in a swimming pool,
well tanned and newly retired, lounging on
the Fed’s largesse.
It’s a problem of ignition, he tells me,
describing his work at the government lab,
where Nobel Prize winners
colluded with explosive experts
to change the course of history.
Fission reactions are fickle, he adds,
balancing his drink on a raft
beneath the blazing sun.
Of course they don’t smuggle in physicists
on secret trains anymore.
Fat Boy has long since flattened Nagasaki
and Little Boy threw a tantrum in Hiroshima.
That’s one reason we’re relaxing
in this giant pool seventy years later,
he argues,
cowering under the harsh light of conscience
and squinting at the Sonoran sun.
Sixteen kilotons of TNT produce just a fraction
of the energy warming my back, I calculate,
conscious of the half life of ice cubes
melting in my glass at the edge of the pool
and admiring the fashions of Bikini Atoll,
where we displaced the locals for a bit of nuclear mayhem.
You can have your island back, we told them,
sixteen mushroom clouds later.
It’s a lovely place to raise your mutant children.
The Feds took care of that as well.
$550 per person per year in restitution—
about the cost of a night at this desert oasis,
a blink of a lash in the ashes of time.
Radioactivity is accumulating in my bones.
I dive deep, dodging the fallout of earnest delusion
and pondering chain reactions of the heart.
I’d rather be in Florida, where scientists serenaded the moon.
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