Stephen Gibson: “Palimpsest”
PALIMPSEST
The vendor held up one with lines “like writing,” not most glass;
we were in Santa Fe, different necklace beads, Los Alamos glass.
Then he asked us to read it, my wife, me, on vacation, flea market,
July, the sun turning foreheads to toast like some magnifying glass.
He told us there was “special energy” in every one of his necklaces,
being from Los Alamos—although to me, at most, they were glass.
The guy smiled and quoted Oppenheimer, the A-bomb, Vishnu’s line:
“I am become Death”—that energy, that was the guy’s boast for glass.
I knew the Oppenheimer-Vishnu quote, before the movie came out,
like I knew John Hersey’s Hiroshima: people became ghosts, not glass.
I’d seen photos of permanent shadows after the A-bomb went off:
families vanished—not in the guy’s Facebook posts about his glass.
Hersey describes one Hiroshima river all in flames after the bomb,
people on fire, jumping in, like a hornet nest you smoke, not glass.
An uncle’s ship in the Pacific, not the Hornet, went up in flames;
for years after the war, he’d drink until he’d float, glass after glass.
A Marine uncle island-hopped, he saw moms throw kids off cliffs,
then jump, and this guy was giving us his bullshit dope about glass.
In my Bronx building, people had numbers tattooed on forearms,
lucky numbers—others were turned into ashes, or soap, not glass.
My father fought Nazis—after the war he was given electroshock—
not some New Age old hippie who couldn’t cope selling his glass.
Stephen, you were on vacation with your wife.
I bought her a necklace, and the thread broke, scattering the glass.
Stephen Gibson has published eight poetry collections: Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale (2024 Able Muse Press); Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (2017 Miller Williams Prize winner, University of Arkansas Press); The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press); Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize winner, Story Line Press; 2021, Story Line Press Legacy Title, Red Hen Press), Paradise (Miller Williams prize finalist, University of Arkansas Press), Frescoes (Lost Horse Press book prize), Masaccio’s Expulsion (MARGIE/IntuiT House book prize), and Rorschach Art (Red Hen Press).