High Noon at Los Alamos
Together we worked while there was sunlight
Hello, I am writing to inquire regarding your precious and widely-beloved fruits. You see, there is an undying hunger in the town where I once lived; the smelters have died and the women have gone and the men have turned to beasts. Increasing numbers of people and animals are coming to accord and are now changing places. How can I blame them? I myself am tired and hungry. I forgot sleep but it has not forgotten me. I need lemons from the garden where you introduced me to exploratory horticulture. Together we worked while there was sunlight. In search of sweetness. Then the tinge of sour that keeps one coming back. You see, I am contemplating many things beyond the land of this darkness. I hold a shell to my ear and hear the static within. For a moment it resolves into focus: a cellist on the stage with arias on her mind. In pursuit of sweetness she raises her bow. What the drawing intones is a wave of wind so strong no breed of fog could withstand it and billow afterwards unchanged. When the atom was finally split: atomos, the first death. Where time is meaningless: our pepper garden, here, and the lemons we worked to wring from hardscrabble. In the documentary footage that captures the postmortem of two halves, there will be strange shadows and flickerings that compel one to check the time. May we abandon this knowledge if it means a kind of lasting peace...