S. BEN-TOV
THE RECOILLESS CANNON
Israel, 1995
Nature devised me for remembering.
I am escorted to this secret Ministry
of Defense Museum, illumined room
where six slim missiles finned with X
are ranged, war by war, on wheeled frames,
and share one striking angle
as though hypnotized. I halfkneel, and rap the russet iron barrel
of a cannon. "Your father never told you?"
asks the unnameable curator. "All his life
he never told me." The old voice descends,
embarrassed, "Some need to forget.
We found this cannon in a weedy field."
I feel inside the hollow bore as smooth as
five feet of river water. It lacks
that spiral groove through which the shell flies
spinning out-like death's
negative DNAso I, whose DNA is wound
up with the State's defense,
discover my father's cannon was a water-pipe
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