“A flash! A white flash sparkled!”

Tatsuichiro Akizuki, Concentric Circles of Death

Under glass: glass dishes which changed

in color; pieces of transformed beer bottles;

a household iron; bundles of wire become solid

lumps of iron; a pair of pliers; a ring of skull-

bone fused to the inside of a helmet; a pair of eyeglasses

taken off the eyes of an eyewitness, without glass,

which vanished, when a white flash sparkled.

An old man, possible a soldier back then,

now reduced down to one who soon will die,

sucks at the cigaret dangling from his lip, peers

at the uniform, scorched, of some tiniest schoolboy,

sighs out bluish mists of his own ashes over

a pressed tin lunch box well crushed back then when

the word future first learned, in a white flash, to jerk tears.

On the bridge outside, in navy black, a group

of schoolchildren line up, hold it, grin at a flash-pop,

swoop in a flock across grass, see a stranger, cry,

hello! hello! hello! and soon, goodbye! goodbye! goodbye!

having pecked up the greetings that fell half unspoken

and the going-sayings that those who went the morning

it happened a white flash sparkled did not get to say.

If all a city’s faces where to shrink back all at once

from their skulls, would a new sound come into existence,

audible above moans eaves extract from wind that smoothes

the grass on graves; or raspings heart’s-blood greases still;

or wails infants trill born already skillful at the grandpa’s rattle;

or intra-screams bitter-knowledge’s speechlessness

memorized, at that white flash, inside closed-forever mouths?

To de-animalize human mentality, to purge it of obsolete

evolutionary characteristics, in particular of death,

which foreknowledge terrorizes the contents of skulls with,

is the fundamental project of technology; however,

pseudologica fantastica’s mechanisms require:

if you would establish deathlessness you must eliminate

those who die; a task attempted, when a white flash sparkled.

Unlike the trees of home, which continually evaporate

along the skyline, the trees here have been enticed down

toward world-eternity. No one knows which gods they enshrine.

Does it matter? Awareness of ignorance is as devout

as knowledge of knowledge. Or more so. Even though not knowing, 

sometimes we weep, from surplus of gratitude, even though knowing,

twice already on earth sparkled a flash, a white flash.

The children go away.  By nature they do. And by memory—

in scorched uniforms, holding tiny crushed lunch tins.

All the pleasure-groans of each night call them to return, satori

their ghostliness back into the ashes, in the momentary shrines,

the thankfulness of arms, from which they will go

again and again, until the day flashes and no one lives

to look back and say, a flash, a white flash sparkled.