The Sand Hill Review http://www.sandhillreview.org 2005
…proclaim the
Dwight
David Eisenhower, August 21, 1959
We gather at the
old buoy grounded
at the end of
near the
water-lapped rocks, its yellow-lettered
SOUTHERNMOST
POINT IN THE
still proud and
true. Tinny voices
spew out of red
plastic in
Buddy
Holly—Missile Gap—Fidel.
News:
outrigger
canoes, roast suckling pigs, surfboards,
girls in grass
skirts, drinks in coconut shells as big
as somebody’s
head, skywriting, and smoke flares
shot off in
pre-dusk light. In our own moist air
we count the
final minutes and seconds
of our
Southernmost Point, knowing not
an atom will be
lost, no life will cease, yet something
will pass from
this place, like glassy light gone out
from a
streetlamp smashed. The hulking steel
will stay, but
something within
its multi-coats
of paint
will instantly
transport itself to lodge
inside some
surf-bathed chunk of pahoehoe
in the tropical
Pacific. Larry holds his kid,
who bats it with
a cool blue hula hoop.
We all, fifteen
or so, touch to feel the buoy change,
like medieval
alchemists watching
the scale on
which they put a dying man to learn
the weight of
the soul that departs at death.
Cheek and ear on
painted metal, I hear
the mingled song
of human touches
and incessant
stirring of the waves
within the great
gray-black mass that goes
south to the
flat horizon and beyond.
John Nimmo