A Collection of Minerals

A Collection of Minerals

 

 

Weekdays on the island my father

engineered a road past the pink

and blue of empty summerhouses

to the missile silo; he took me down once

into the corrugated metal shaft                                   ⁵

 

where the white rocket would be

lowered into place, covered over

with brush and earth once the warhead

was assembled. That afternoon

I reeled in a yellowtail,                                               ¹⁰

 

a disk of a fish

the color of his bulldozers,

gills fluttering on the narrow body

only my thumb’s width from eye

to windshield eye: glittering                                       ¹⁵

 

fool’s gold, no good

to eat. Then, my father intent

on the water, my line rushed in zigzags

like a faultline opening;

what I pulled onto the metal pier                                ²⁰

 

was a rainbowed thrust

of slick muscle coiling

far from anything it knew,

shuddering in air as if

it were in pain, as if                                                     ²⁵

 

it required secrecy

and darkness. My father ran

to the back of his flatbed

—the government truck, its number

stenciled in a chalky tattoo—                                     ³⁰

 

rifled in his toolbox for the machete

he oiled and sharpened Saturday mornings.

This was Titusville, Florida,

the year our class practiced

climbing under our desks,                                           ³⁵

 

holding our hands over our faces

and eyes; our mothers stocked up

on canned goods, making caches

beneath the kitchen sink, “in case,”

and men bought knifes or rifles                                  ⁴⁰

 

for “protection.” How sad we must have looked,

the fourth grade kneeling

on the marbled linoleum

while our teacher described the sirens,

what would become of the windows,                                    ⁴⁵

 

and offered us the defense

of our formica desktops placed squarely

between ourselves and unimaginable

light. In my mineral collection,

a box of little stones glued in rows                             ⁵⁰

 

and labeled—feldspar, amethyst,

pyrite—there was a tiny green chunk

of uranium. I’d opened the box

in the dark to see if it would glow

like the face of my parents’ alarm,                              ⁵⁵

 

expecting its chilly radiance

to steal over my bed as it burned out

its half-life. But nothing happened,

and so I kept it in a drawer,

thinking it would change something,                          ⁶⁰

 

something it touched might become important

or gigantic. When the teacher said

if the bomb fell our bodies would change,

I thought of the jagged surface

of the stone, ancient                                                    ⁶⁵

 

and at home in the dark. My father

hacked at the eel until

there were only fragments

of the rippling it had been;

even the pieces                                                            ⁷⁰

 

twisted on the steel pier

until he swept them over the edge

with the blade, and told me to pack

my tackle box, and drove me home –

where I was restless, and felt                                      ⁷⁵

 

something had been violated, cut apart

from its submerged privacy,

and the stones in the case seemed puny

and trivial, the sheen of the satin spar

unlikely and disturbing, the uranium                          ⁸⁰

 

turned inward, revealing nothing,

and in a while I tore the stones loose

from the box one by one and traded them

for something I now cannot remember.

 

 

Book: Turtle, Swan & Bethlehem in Broad Daylight: Two Volumes of Poetry by Mark Doty.

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Location: Urbana and Chicago, Illinois

Year: 2000           Pages: 74-77

 

Note: Though this poem is excerpted from an edition of Bethlehem in Broad Daylight paired with Doty’s first book, the original edition of Bethlehem in Broad Dayl