but not forever
Eye of the cat,
Eye of regard,
Eye of the storm,
Calm before the pounce with
No “chuff chuff chuff”
Prayer for prey:
Spacetime for springers.*
–Yip
* Space-Time for Springers is the title of a perfectly charming science fiction short story by the late Fritz Leiber. Yes, it’s about cats.
After a certain age, they do indeed cycle this quickly…
Snow covered trees, crystalline, silent:
A scene from Faerie but
Without the Hunt.
Awake! Awake!
The flowers summon you
On a morning breeze.
Storm clouds roil and
Lightning flares from cloud to ground.
It strikes with sudden shock.
Morning it is,
But the yard is silent.
Where are the swallows?
–Yip
Yet another shark sighting…
Shaggy and wild-eyed, he stopped her and her dog at the beach.
“Did ye hear of the shark that bit the dog’s tail?”
“…What…?”
“Aye, lass, it was a horror… just now.”
He leaned close to her ear and his voice dropped to gargling whisper, a smell of whiskey, tobacco and sweat.
“The shark… Aye, the shark!” He paused: “Therein lies the tale.”
— Yip
on the bombing of Hiroshima
On the news of the death of Claude Robert Eatherly, with apologies to T.S. Eliot.
A million burning people screamed in his brain,
Their eyeballs bubbling, their faces flowing,
Nameless shadows etched in concrete.
The man who fingered Hiroshima
Began dying that day, and each bomb dropped
Struck another mortal blow
Until he returned, no longer at ease,
Robbing the Post Office not for money but his life,
Screaming in the night for the radioactive dead.
But atomic cancer took his voice then
Slowly, slowly sent him to join
The people for whom he had wept.
— Yip in July, 1978
When we speak of the sacrifices veterans make in the fulfilment of their duties, until recently it was usually in reference to the visibly physical: death, dismemberment. Since the Vietnam war, it’s become apparent that the experience of war, including simply be a witness to it, can have crippling consequences. Traumatic Brain Injury, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other subtle psychological poisoning can be every bit as consequential as any physical wound. How vulnerable military personnel are to things like PTSD depends in part on the degree to which the individual feels the experience was justified, was necessary.
People who need to justify the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will find it easy to be cynical about Major Eatherly‘s post-military conversion to anti-nuclear weapons politics. They may be right in their cynicism for all that I know. Motives are such slippery things! But my humble opinion is that whether sincere or feigned, Major Eatherly was also right in his opposition. Furthermore, it is long past time that us civilians need to start taking responsibility for what we are asking military personnel to do on our behalf.
Were the bombings necessary or justified? This is an old question that is vehemently argued, to the point that the National Air and Space Museum found it easier to display the Enola Gay (the aircraft that atom bombed Hiroshima) without any discussion of the historical context. My armchair general opinion is that if you assume that an invasion of the Japanese home islands was necessary then it’s a moral toss-up. But Japan had already lost the war, getting their leadership to admit it was the issue. It’s possible that a brief blockade could have done the trick as well.
That leaves politics as the deciding factor, and there I’m inclined to agree with those who argue that this was an act intended to nail down the Pacific edge of an American empire, and was aimed as much at the Soviet Union (a country with imperial ambitions as well) as at Japan. That said, the effects of the bombings were so spectacularly horrendous that they may have helped keep the subsequent Cold War as cool as it ended up being. We’ll never know.
Said the schedule board:
No. 15… (ambiguously)… Delayed.
No “E.T.A.”, only “Delayed”.
Side-tracked on a digression
Or hidden in an air pocket
Or towed to Toledo?
An interrupted transmission,
An uncertain interval
Before arrival.
— Yip
some things are best not known
In the city, it’s not unusual for one to have only the vaguest of acquaintance with one’s neighbors. My current next door neighbor is an excellent example. He moved in perhaps two years ago, three years ago? One loses track, and our paths cross maybe two… most certainly not more than four times a year.
His arrival had been hardly noticeable. One day the old resident’s name disappeared from the mailbox. Then, some weeks later, a new name appeared. And oddly, a smudge blossomed above his doorway, as if someone had held, for a time, a candle too close to the ceiling. Or had it always been there? When we finally met, I didn’t ask about it. It was hardly important, after all, and that it had anything to do with him was pure speculation.
Over time, he was always cordial but closed. “Working hard,” he would reply to “How are you?” “Going to work,” he would explain if we met on the landing: an older, quiet, always neatly dressed gentleman with a vague accent that somehow evokes the eastern Mediterranean.
Some months (how many?) after he moved in, the smudge became an X… or is it a cross? When did that happen? I hadn’t noticed, but the possibilities seemed amusing somehow. I entirely missed the appearance of a second ‘X’ some indeterminant months later. When a third ‘X’ appeared, I was a bit flummoxed. When did this happen, or had there always been three?
Oh, but it isn’t my imagination. A few weeks ago, there were suddenly four.
He’s keeping score.
–Yip
The turbulent wind of an open convertible at highway speed rattled the envelope in his hand. It shook and bobbed like a leaf on a tree. From the driver’s seat, Maeve looked across the car. Soft spoken, her voice was hard to hear against the wind: “It’s from your father. Aren’t you going to open it?”
Was he? Dad could have called. He could have emailed. He could have knocked on their door. And he could have done that months ago. But now, a letter? What could that mean? With Dad, the medium was often the message; did he really want to know? Instead of answering, Dan sighed. After a moment he awkwardly torn the end off the envelope and extracted a sheet. It said:
Danny:
Four months have gone by since we last spoke. I am doing something that I hadn’t planned to do, and that is, to make one more try if you will do the same thing also. I shall offer you what you wanted for a starter, so here goes. I apologize. Now, I expect you to come through with your part, namely, a two way, one on one, thoughtful, equal, sensitive and not insulting start at communication with an end goal of bridging over the gap which separates us. Agreed? Otherwise, J’ai fini, this time for real.
Dad
“What did he say, Dan?” Maeve asked.
Dan held the letter between two fingers while it gyrated in the wind. After a moment he let go and it flew away.
“Nothing,” he replied.
— Yip
