Rock-a-Bye-Baby Boogie-Woogie
Donald Platt | Poetry
On the twelfth floor
of the Belvedere Hotel, I pass a door that says EMPLOYEES
ONLY. Through
its rectangle of glass reinforced with latticework of wire,
I see three small
green dumpsters, each stenciled in white CENTURY WASTE.
They are piled high
with black trash bags. A week’s worth of hotel garbage
to be taken down
on the service elevator, wheeled out to the street, compacted
by a garbage truck,
and hauled to some landfill on Staten Island. There, they’ll become
part of a Mount
Trashmore tall as the pyramids in Giza. I wish the first quarter
of our 21st century
could be placed in three-ply, black, plastic bags, twist-tied,
trucked to an outer
borough of our galaxy, and forgotten so we might start over.
No more land mines,
concertina wire, white phosphorus, F-35 fighter jets, smart bombs,
dumb bombs, drones.
No more Iron Dome. No more unexploded cluster munitions.
But Pandora’s
war chest has been opened. Ohio-class nuclear submarines
dive 1,500 feet.
They approach crush depth. They carry up to 154 Tomahawk missiles,
each armed with twelve
Trident II D-5 warheads with a range of 6,500 nautical miles.
One such
nonesuch submarine can blow up half our hemisphere.
Fireworks
for the Fourth of July. We will end up in a dumpster labeled
CENTURY WASTE
on the thousandth floor of hell’s hotel. When the bough breaks,
the dumpster will fall
And down will come baby, dumpster and all. Next exit is us,
human arthropods
who have skyscrapers for exoskeletons. Hives for bees whose only
honey is money.
Strangely, what comes to my mind is Domenico del Ghirlandaio’s
portrait of an old
man in a vermilion, fur-lined robe, holding on his lap
a boy in a scarlet
cap, from which golden ringlets escape and flow like water
in a waterfall
that plumets over a hundred-foot cliff, gets pounded on rocks
to sun-spangled
mist. The child gazes up at the old man’s warty forehead.
Receding hair
turned to iron. Bumpy, bulbous nose deformed by rhinophyma
to the texture
of cauliflower. He rests one small hand on his grandfather’s chest.
The old man
looks back. How did I grow to be so old, so ugly, so quickly?
Donald Platt’s ninth book, Tender Voyeur, will be published by Grid Books in 2025. His eighth book, Swansdown, won the 2022 Off the Grid Poetry Prize. In the last year and a half, two of his poems have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, as well as forty other poems in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, diode, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Cimarron Review, Seneca Review, Plume, Laurel Review, Notre Dame Review, Barrow St., Cincinnati Review, Florida Review, Fence, Tupelo Quarterly, Rattle, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Five Points, Adroit Journal, Southern Review, Iowa Review, Lana Turner, New Criterion, and Yale Review. He teaches poetry writing at Purdue University.