Judith E

Judith E. Johnson

HAPPY JACK COMES HOME

(Happy Jack is the name of a uranium mine in Colorado, and appears in several of the poems from my first book, URANIUM POEMS, as the prospector for whom the mine was named)

such jolly nights, my old friend, Jack Hammer, since last i talked with you

in your rattling hold of the heart under the Colorado reefs

where the sharks wear human faces and their teeth go click click

I have not bitten anything out of the rocks i could take home and keep

nothing that lights up, nothing that starts wires humming, makes needles

dance, nothing to wrap with a ribbon and give to Mother

Oh it is quiet here. What quiet you have brought in the wake

of your bustle and slamming. Not a mouth stirs in the kitchen

where we cook up sharks’ fin soup and wait for the shark to fall in

Yet the sun will rise up with rage and burst with rage

out of the soup kettle we are stirring, you and i,

and envy,

why, envy will hammer in our veins like the pulse of a maniac

stuttering. There will be bombs placed in every locker room

where the human soup is stirred and stirred and tasted.

The boys of summer will fall like the summer flies

legs pulled off by that curious chef of luminosity

who wants to see what we taste like without our wills

to move us. Our legs will not get us out of here.

We will lie silently in the soup, heavy fizzing rocks that throb

when you touch them, we will lie silently in the morgue

in green plastic bags, and be whirled around the sun where no

history tells of our progress into a safe

burning

rest,

and the stuttering of needle on graph paper registers a mindless holding pattern.

The death of the brain is all it takes for this transplant. They will take out your brain

and use it to make history sing in the silent book of our deaths.

.....

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