Nobody could remember anything, spirits flew out of mouths & noses, out of the sky, across Colorado plains & the tent flapped happily open spacious & didn’t fall down.

June 18, 1978

II Peace Protest

Cumulus clouds float across blue sky

over the white-walled Rockwell Corporation factory

—am I going to stop that?

Rocky Mountains rising behind us

Denver shining in morning light

—Led away from the crowd by police and photographers

Middleaged Ginsberg & Ellsberg taken down the road

to the grayhaired Sheriff’s van—

But what about Einstein? What about Einstein? Hey, Einstein Come back!

III Golden Courthouse

Waiting for the Judge, breathing silent

Prisoners, witnesses, Police—

the stenographer yawns into her palms.

August 9, 1978

IV Everybody’s Fantasy

I walked outside & the bomb’d

dropped lots of plutonium

all over the Lower East Side

There weren’t any buildings left just

iron skeletons

groceries burned, potholes open to

stinking sewer waters

There were people starving and crawling

across the desert

the Martian UFOs with blue

Light destroyer rays

passed over and dried up all the

waters

Charred Amazon palmtrees for

hundreds of miles on both sides

of the river

August 10, 1978

V Waiting Room at the Rocky Flats Plutonium Plant

“Give us the weapons we need to protect ourselves!”

the bareheaded guard lifts his flyswatter above the desk

—whap!

A green-letter’d shield on the pressboard wall!

“Life is fragile. Handle with care”—

My Goodness! here’s where they make the nuclear bomb-triggers.

August 17, 1978

VI Numbers in Red Notebook

2,000,000 killed in Vietnam

13,000,000 refugees in Indochina 1972

200,000,000 years for the Galaxy to revolve on its core

24,000 the Babylonian Great Year

24,000 half life of plutonium

2,000 the most I ever got for a poetry reading

80,000 dolphins killed in the dragnet

4,000,000,000 years earth been born

Boulder, Summer 1978

Plutonian Ode

1 What new element before us unborn in nature? Is there a new thing under the Sun?

At last inquisitive Whitman a modern epic, detonative, Scientific theme

First penned unmindful by Doctor Seaborg with poisonous hand, named for Death’s planet through the sea beyond Uranus

whose chthonic ore fathers this magma-teared Lord of Hades, Sire of avenging Furies, billionaire Hell-King worshipped once

5 with black sheep throats cut, priest’s face averted from underground mysteries in a single temple at Eleusis,

Spring-green Persephone nuptialed to his inevitable Shade, Demeter mother of asphodel weeping dew,

her daughter stored in salty caverns under white snow, black hail, gray winter rain or Polar ice, immemorable seasons before

Fish flew in Heaven, before a Ram died by the starry bush, before the Bull stamped sky and earth

or Twins inscribed their memories in cuneiform clay or Crab’d flood

10 washed memory from the skull, or Lion sniffed the lilac breeze in Eden—

Before the Great Year began turning its twelve signs, ere constellations wheeled for twenty-four thousand sunny years

slowly round their axis in Sagittarius, one hundred sixty-seven thousand times returning to this night

Radioactive Nemesis were you there at the beginning black Dumb tongueless unsmelling blast of Disillusion?

I manifest your Baptismal Word after four billion years

15 I guess your birthday in Earthling Night, I salute your dreadful presence lasting majestic as the Gods,

Sabaot, Jehova, Astapheus, Adonaeus, Elohim, Iao, Ialdabaoth, Aeon from Aeon born ignorant in an Abyss of Light,

Sophia’s reflections glittering thoughtful galaxies, whirlpools of star-spume silver-thin as hairs of Einstein!

Father Whitman I celebrate a matter that renders Self oblivion!

Grand Subject that annihilates inky hands & pages’ prayers, old orators’ inspired Immortalities,

20 I begin your chant, openmouthed exhaling into spacious sky over silent mills at Hanford, Savannah River, Rocky Flats, Pantex, Burlington, Albuquerque