Salt caves in New Mexico with creeping
exactitude, crystal by crystal, surround
canisters of Cold War nuclear waste,
sealing off the heebie-jeebies; centuries will pass
suchways. Once upon a time I scraped
beneath the kitchen table a fat magnet
to make iron filings (topside) do my bidding:
bristle, lean, lie down, be still. They stood
like soldiers, they sprouted like a corpse’s beard,
they froze the fluxlines of repulsion
and attraction. And Saturn’s gee-whiz rings
(I read this book to my child, a five year-old boy
with a willful streak like a frozen river through
warm-looking brown fields, a mouthbreather
who mutters spells against his parents; his blondbrown
hair grows soft as duck feathers)—Saturn’s rings are in
reality ice and rocks whirling round—hunks the size
of the house we live in; flotsams fingernail-tiny,
flickering—prismatic, perfect, just near enough. So
one must hold with the hidden forces.