In our loud political times, I’ve been thinking of the quiet and powerful poems of William Stafford (1914-1993), whose work often engaged, even if obliquely, with political themes. His “At the Bomb Testing Site”—written in 1953 and first published in 1957—looks back to the Atomic bomb test on July 16, 1945, in a part of the New Mexico desert aptly called Jornada del Muerto (Journey of the Dead). At least, from what I can tell, the consensus among commentators on the poem is that it looks to that event, even though the test took place at 5:30 a.m. rather than noon as in the poem, which works more as a parable than a literal account. Given that the poem’s primary focus is a lizard, we would do well to regard it as a latter-day example of a very old genre, the beast fable.
The simplicity of this poem contrasts powerfully with the grand language that often surrounds atomic weaponry. Some might recall Robert Oppenheimer’s rather tearful interview years after the bomb test, in which he recalled the lines from the Bhagavad-Gita spoken by Vishnu in his multi-armed form: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Such language can of course be put to very good uses, but so much of this grandeur was already swirling around the Atom bomb that Stafford’s quiet indirection carries its own distinctive power.
The “panting lizard” of the poem is waiting “for history, its elbows tense.” History, that distinctively human form of organizing events into narrative form, is about to encroach in an especially noticeable way on the lizard’s desert space. Professor Kellar Autumn, of the Biology Department at Lewis & Clark College, informs me that lizards do indeed pant to regulate body temperature. But as Professor Autumn also wrote in an email, “seeing a desert lizard pant is rather unusual as it’s typically a last resort. Water is at a tremendous premium and lizards appear reluctant to spend it unless it’s a life or death situation. So that lizard in the Stafford poem may have thought it was in serious trouble.” Within the fabulistic space of the poem, the lizard is facing some very serious trouble, a truly deadly situation.
The poem’s hour of noon stands in well for the turning point of history into the atomic age, for noon is a turning point—from a.m. to p.m.—though like any telling of history, it is also a human construct; there is no universal tick or tock to signal the shift from morning to afternoon. The shift depends rather on humans’ agreement to recognize the clocks that tick the time away. This entry into the atomic era was written with actions as well as words—as history is always written—and this new era carries unprecedented possibilities of of destruction; so it’s no wonder that the lizard is panting, as it is no wonder that its tense elbows are waiting. There is very little else that this small creature can do.
But what living creature is anything but small compared to the coming detonation? The humans shrink into the landscape as well. As the poem emphasizes, the lizard looks at “something farther off / than people could see, an important scene / acted in stone for little selves / at the flute end of consequences.” The world stage on which these events take place is one of sparse scenery on a “continent without much on it / under a sky that never cared less.” The nearly bare stage emphasizes the vulnerability of all the creatures involved, including the humans who enact the drama without a mention of God or the gods or fate, only an indifferent sky under which events take place for the “little selves” who watch or are yet to come. As happens in rock formations, the fluted conduits of history carry forces along to consequences that we might better anticipate were we to live in greater solidarity with our fellow creatures—so this poem suggests.
The closing line—“The hands gripped hard on the desert”—suggests a human connection to the little lizard. One might expect this part of lizard anatomy to be colloquially called feet, but several have pointed out that “hands” seems. a deliberate anthropomorphism. The word choice signals a human connection with the watchful reptile, as well as continuity between that part of life on the planet that has evolved into lizard form and that which has taken human form. After all, what is about to happen—the coming of the version of history about to encroach on this desert place—will have consequences for pretty much all life forms on the planet; those “flute ends of consequences,” the grooved patterns of action and result, leave very little on the planet untouched.
Julian Huxley famously said that humans are that phase of evolution that has become conscious of itself. Once evolution becomes self-conscious, it can make choices about the directions that its further development will take. The starkness of the poem’s final image, that hard grip on the indifferent desert floor, throws into relief the responsibility that we bear in how we write the history enacted on this stage. The panting lizard grips the desert just before some of its fellow earthly inhabitants test the efficacy of one of their rather dire inventions. The poem quietly asks that we just as rigorously test the moral and ethical efficacy of our decisions. These are, after all, the decisions that create our story.