David Clewell, "How the Visiting Poet Ended up in the Abandoned Nike Missile Silo . . ."

How the Visiting Poet Ended up in the Abandoned Nike Missile Silo in Pacific, Missouri, After Surviving a Morning of Grade-School Classroom Appearances on Behalf of One of the Better Impulses in  the History of Human Behavior

i.
Because it was lunchtime, and I wasn't hungry.  Because I asked
the man with the keys. And because most people had stopped asking
years ago, he gladly walked me down the road, through acres of wheat,
under the no-longer-electrifying fence to an overgrown mound of concrete
where a pair of doors, ridiculously thick, angled into the ground.
He sprang the padlocks, and then with his crowbar we pried and pulled
until those doors finally gave. He showed me down a long staircase
by flashlight until we hit bottom, standing suddenly in the middle of
another one of those it-seemed-like-a-pretty-good-idea-at-the-time
cockeyed Cold War motifs: a cavernous bunker out of nowhere,
one of four whose aim was protecting St. Louis in the tenuous '50s and '60s.
Most U.S. cities of consequence were ringed by these underground wonders
where Nike Hercules missiles with nuclear warheads could be raised,
then guided to vaporize enemy bombers --- a desperate last line of defense
to prevent the Russians from dropping their blood-Red nuclear cargo.
And never mind the ensuing blast, the politics and bombast,
the unavoidable fallout. Maybe, just maybe, what might be a disaster
would be visited on the boondocks alone, while the cities themselves
theoretically were saved for a more consequential future.

And I was thinking surely this was some overblown, cartoonish opposite
of the do-it-yourself backyard shelter
that Benny the Ball's father never did quite finish building in 1962.
The Ball and I would take refuge there anyway, smoking Kool
after pilfered Kool -- no end of the fourth grade, not to mention the world,
that we could see. We were veterans of the weekly air-raid
drills at Hamilton School, where every kid was issued actual dog tags
so we could be identified in case of the unthinkable, according to
the lovely Miss Jago, our first real bombshell teacher. In case worse came
to worse. Since she'd put it that way, Miss Jago was almost all
we ever thought about. Back upstairs, bent over our desks
in the middle of New Jersey, halfway between Philadelphia and New York,
we couldn't help ourselves: yes, we were small, but we kept busy
doing the bigger arithmetic -- what we most needed was more time, and then
one day our indefinite lives would finally add up to something.

ii.

Now over forty years later, he tells me he couldn't believe someone thought
it would actually work:
St. Louis was worth more than four of these. Hell — 
Chicago had eleven. Even cow-town Kansas City had five.
He was twenty
and stationed right where we stood.
We never knew what might happen, one day
to the next.
In 1962, who did? Everyone's future was miles up in the air.
But he's still here — down-to-earth Senior Custodian at Nike Elementary,
a school named after a missile system. Forget about the winged
Greek goddess of victory.
It's nothing to do with the sneakers, either.
Just try telling those kids that the sneakers weren't until later.

The base was officially dismantled in 1967, but when he hit a certain switch
I could see the enormous lift was amazingly still in decent working order.
I could hear the power left behind in all of its ghostly hydraulics —
fifty feet of cold steel rising, humming overhead in the noontime dark.
That would bring the missiles to the surface, where they'd be loaded, 
by hand, onto launchers,
and I was humming too, sweating it out over nothing
all over again, there in the middle of that anti-wheat, anti-Heartland, anti-anything-that-comes-naturally-out-of-the-ground anti-silo.

Technically, the school district owns this now. That's why I have keys. 
They mostly want to pretend it doesn't exist, but I keep telling them 
that with a little fixing-up, they'd have one hell of a principal's office.

And me, without a hall pass. I wanted up. I really had to go. He had to laugh:
Okay, but how about a song or two before we leave? To keep our cool
we used to do a lot of singing here — Get  a Job.  Earth Angel.
The End of the World. One guy's version of High Hopes I swear 
was better than Sinatra's.
And before I could manage an answer,
he was every bit of twenty, breaking into Great Balls of Fire without warning
one more time, giving it everything he'd never truly have in him again.
Sometimes you've just got to sing your damn heart out to prove 
you haven't lost it completely.

So I struck up a few rowdy bars of Whitman.
A little pizzicato William Carlos Williams. It was strangely like singing
in some gigantic historical shower — all that unheard-of resonance — but
it would be another matter entirely back at the surface, in the wide-open
unbridled air. I'm not sure even the greatest poets ever saved so much
as a single citizen for more than a few nights at most. Let alone a city.
But with a Hercules or two behind them, I'd say all bets are off.

Some of those words sounded pretty good, but I'm here to tell you 
that you can't carry a tune to save your life.

iii.

I made it back just in time: into the sunlight, under  the fence,
through the wheat, up the road to the well-oiled front door of Nike
Elementary. Because on that now-surmountable ground, someone had gone
and built a school without a basement. Because the only warheads around
these days are nearly harmless candies, and Hercules is a cable-station
cartoon dog with the mange — although no matter what  happens to him next,
at least he's wearing his tags. And because students keep showing up
all the same, dressed in T-shirts, jeans, and those inescapable sneakers.

I could have been their afternoon distraction from the daily weight
of science and history, but if these kids thought they were going
to get off as easy as the morning classes had — an hour or so of the usual
whims of whatever restless goddesses and gods, and then the inevitable
blandishments mere mortals can't help offering up in their direction,
or maybe some horses, a few headstrong flowers in winter, the red wheel
barrow, the dead deer pushed over the edge into the river at last
for the ten-thousandth time — I'm afraid they'd have another thing coming,
that afternoon and always.
In this bad-dream age of suicide bombings,
anthrax, sleeper cells, the threat of suitcase nukes sure to be carried out
of one country for unpacking in another, even children see a deadlier world
right outside the door. Air-raid drills and guided missiles are as quaint
as home-cooked breakfast. There's no way they'll ever thrill to the sound
of an All-Clear siren in their lifetimes. They'll never know how much
some of us lived for that. Instead, they have to settle for
the bell that sends them home for another day — spared, with any luck,
from being bored to death.

So I told them something I finally was sure of:
where human breath is so easily extinguished, taken away for good each time
by slightly different means, metaphor doesn't stand a fighting chance.
It's what they'd suspected ever since they were born-in real life, nothing
is ever unassailably enough like anything else.
I promised them
there's never been any great excuse for poems. But even at their worst,
they're not exactly weapons of mass destruction. And we can always
find them if we need to. They keep appearing, inexplicably, all over the place.
There's no telling why that is — not even here, a moment before everything
grows so unnaturally quiet, in what could have been one more sincerely
misguided attempt at a last line in their defense.


David Clewell