'Til the End of Time by Jane Miller

Beauty and barrenness all around
when they leave the Quonset hut
after the briefing-

twelve men climb through the hatch
the plane lumbers down the runway
(in the sand and coral nearby
test fuselages burn)

slow on the ground and graceful in air
it burrows through the soft Pacific night
"June is Bustin' Out All Over" on the radio stateside

under the B-29 the atomic bomb is not a handsome weapon
dull gray gunmetal
nose tungsten steel
the plane weaves through columns of cumulus cloud

breaking to view the dark ocean
the moon and bright tropical stars
some distance from the drop

women wearing dresses and kimonos
burn according to the shading of the patterns
on the pages of an open book some very far distance away
the black paper seems untouched

but the heat-absorbing letters neatly burn out
some walk with their burned arms up
away from their burned bodies

An unapologetic Japanophile, Miller (Univ. of Arizona) follows up her new and selected volume of 1996 (Memory at These Speeds) with these Asian-style poems: imagistic with a deliberately unfinished quality. Motivated by deep guilt over the atom bomb and her secret / sin of commission, Miller in poem after poem juxtaposes scenes inspired by the 19th-century artist Hiroshige with images of nuclear disaster. Hers is an endless dialectic of innocent victims and evil bomb-makers. In Site Y, she follows the course of the fireball (the rest is history); in Firewatcher, a ten-year-old watches for fires on the day before the bomb; Edward Teller, in another poem, doesn't worry his conscience one bit; elsewhere, the speaker imagines the bomb from below, and a hundred thousand fall in the city like blossoms along a riverbank. Miller continues to worry about nuclear power and waste: Views of Edo moves from a panorama of the American nuclear-blasted landscape, teeming with radioactivity, to Hiroshiges golden view of Edo. Nuclear accidents, nuclear cover-ups, nuclear garbage, and we still zap dogs for scientific research (The Voiceless Beagles of Davis).