At the Bomb Testing Site

BY WILLIAM E. STAFFORD

At noon in the desert a panting lizard

waited for history, its elbows tense,

watching the curve of a particular road

as if something might happen.

It was looking at something farther off

than people could see, an important scene

acted in stone for little selves

at the flute end of consequences.

There was just a continent without much on it

under a sky that never cared less.

Ready for a change, the elbows waited.

The hands gripped hard on the desert.

A political poem in which not a single political statement is made, what Stafford himself calls more “nonapparently political than apparently political.”

. . . .

In poetry a choice is made about the part that will represent the whole. Form, in its deepest sense, is selection. True form is the product of an extraordinary vision.
There’s a lizard at the bomb testing site. The poem is an attempt to measure everything according to the duration and intensity of that little life.

A “weasel-worded” poem.
The naked world. The innocent lizard. A most primitive form of life. Ugly. Expendable – like those laboratory animals stuck inside a maze under the bright lights.
One assumes they’re afraid too.

“How pure and great must be the cause for which so much blood is spilled,” says Aleksandar Wat.

For now, just the timeless moment. Just the lizard, the desert. He’s panting, trembling a little. Think of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Armadillo,” the fire raining on him. . . . That will come later.
History is marching. . . . Or, History is a throw of the dice . . .

The poem is an attempt to convey certain old premonitions. The first lizard knew the world will end some day.
And at the heart of it – Incomprehension! Bewilderment!

Out there, perhaps scratched in stone, there’s the matchstick figure of the Indian humpbacked flute player. He is surrounded by other matchstick figures. They are enacting a scene, a sacred dance . . .

The sphinx is watching. An American sphinx waiting for history. The hands grip hard, so we are on the very verge. It is the instant in which all past and all future wait suspended.

One should speak of Stafford’s disappearing acts. As in “Traveling Through the Dark,” he leaves us at the most crucial moments. At the end of his great poems we are always alone, their fateful acts and their consequences now our own to consider.
Solitude as an absolute, the only one.

The heavens above couldn’t care less. The poet asks the philosopher in us to consider the world in its baffling presence.

An American sphinx in the desert of our spirit. Let us keep asking her questions.

In the meantime, we can say with Heidegger that poems such as this one open the largest view of the earth, sky, mortals and their true and false gods.

Filed under Poems

William Stafford