Cryogenics

A memory moves from breathless waking

to the pelt of snow

across a windshield,

my father's smoke

in the upholstery.

Driving too fast over bridges,

one of us hums,

Mother, may I go and swim?

Yes, my darling daughter.

Hang your coat on yonder limb

And don't go near the water.

I wake up in a tent of oxygen.

On the other side, my father

clips holes in new cigars

but doesn't smoke them.

Behind him, a chart he calls

The Elements.

Their bold names:

calcium, iodine, molybdenum, neon.

"Oxygen is eight," he tells me.

"Just like you.

Why don't you memorize the chart?"

"The first is hydrogen,

an egg-one yolk, one shell."

The definitions follow

like prescriptions-proton, nucleus,

atomic number, valency.

The one in red is called uranium.

Unstable, overcrowded.

I have not yet seen the photographs

of ruined cities.

The boy beside me wears a hockey jacket,

Frank embroidered on the sleeve.

A school bus ran him over;

now his pee drips down a tube.

After the nurse empties his plastic bag,

I show Frank the element named Francium.

"What's an element?" he wonders. .

"It's chemistry,

as small as you can go.

The science of how things change.

Rusty iron, moldy food, explosions."'

I sound as if I know.

This is the way my father talks.

People believe him

and retell his stories.

The common cormorant, or shag,

Lays eggs inside a paper bag.

The reason you will see, no doubt.

It is to keep the lightning out.

On the chart, a second alphabet.

Fe for iron, Ag-silver, Sn-tin,

the ones identified by alchemists

who melted lead in search of nobler metal,

a gold to make them wise

and young and well.

The doctors lay their cold coins

on our chests.

We name them

Titanium, Antimony, and Boron.

My tent comes down. Free breathing.

Outside, girls my age

skate downriver holding hands.

Frank teaches me his song,

First came the doctor

Then came the nurse

Then came the baby with the alligator purse.

My father brings us bubblegum cigars,

laboratory books, blue-red pencils

sharpened at both ends.

He sits between our beds.

"You ever heard of rare earth?

It's neither rare nor earth."

But Frank is very sleepy.

They take him for a second operation.

At night the hospital grows dark

beyond our cyclops, the golden call-light.

I hear Franky crying

and think of cormorants . . .

But what these unobservant birds

Have failed to notice is that herds

Of wandering bears may come with buns

And steal the bags to hold the crumbs.

"Francium, don't cry.

Look what the ocean does to shells.

That's salt.

It wrecks your cheeks."

I point my flashlight

at the periodic chart.

"Tears are mostly sodium and chlorine.

You can change them into something better."

Frank says the tears are stuck

above his collarbone.

"I got a pond down there."

I press the call-light

and tell Frank to freeze the pond.

"Skate your name in cursive on the ice."

But Frank is shivering.

"Don't make me laugh," he cries.

"Tt hurts.

Tell me more about rare earth."

"There's no such thing.

My father made it up.

We'll get more blankets.

Let's play scissors-paper-stone:

One, two, three . . . shoot."

The next morning Frank is gone.

Beyond his bed, platinum snowflakes

sift down like cinders,

are swept across the solid river.