Poet and Bomb

•

The soul split like a melon
by random vibration
on the air, revised

and split again, halves
to quarters to ad infinitum.
Molecules vaporized

to become the vibrating
air itself. Death-
shimmer on the wind

a kind of weather
to make you weep, your
heart stutter as if hearing a great poem.

He had been speaking
just a moment before,
his tongue dancing along his teeth

deft as a snake to cut
the undifferentiated whole
into swaths of created marvel.

The truth in a single preposition.
Universe in a verb. Nouns
trotting double-time. Until

someone blew him sideways
into silence. Until his tongue
became the air it previously sliced.

A last divine exhalation
and all song became this single
hummed note: the ringing in our ears
that overwhelms every word.