Area 51: Birthday Eve
       

Exit your age by way of Oregon, Georgia boy,
by way of first footsink into Pacific sand
first fragrance of Douglass fir, first earful
of frog-creak, first eyefall up to Cascades snow.
    Growing up Baptist, no hand wet
your baby head, so it's high time to be
misted like a Sitka spruce by holy Wahkeena
and Horsetail, to be christened wild, withheld
from hell by a secondhand soaking from plasma
torch cataracts creasing old, cold lava as they have
for the last sixty centuries. Touch your boot toes
to the cold lap in the basalt bowl, black salver
catching white gout, cup running over.
The birthday sermon — It's early in eternity —
deafens you. Stand here in the flow and you might
wear down to your real root, like the python
gripping that Ponderosa pine into the rock slope.
Play off your groping as grasp. Act like you're
sure and secure as a padlock clicked shut in a hasp.
Or glory solo. Show your ass, for there's not one
witness out here with you: 51 is restricted access.
So learn what will fly. Genuflect to saucers fallen
from the sky, to the alien you inside. Godspeed,
test pilot. Grip the dawn stick of X-52. Morning is nigh.

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Copyright © 2021 Gordon Johnston All rights reserved
from Scaring the Bears
Mercer University Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission