Loose talk recently emitted by powerful people about the possibility of exploding nuclear weapons again naturally made me recall Beat poet Gregory Corso’s marvelously playful shape-poem “Bomb.

Why do I call it a shape poem? It might not have looked like one at first, when published by City Lights in 1958 as a series of broadsides. It assumed something closer to its ideal “shape” form only in 1960 when it was included in The Happy Birthday of Death, a collection of Corso’s poems published by New Directions. There, because of the poem’s length, “Bomb” was inserted into the binding in a compressed fold-out accordion format. When expanded (an effect you couldn’t see until you had the whole structure stretched out in front of you), the poem revealed the exploding bomb itself. Long parallel poetic lines at the top of one stretched-out accordion page suggested the pretty, puffy mushroom cloud, with shorter parallel poetic lines in erratic formation descending down the length of the unfurled page and— when you flip the accordion page over— continuing on the page’s back side to rest, at last, on Ground Zero. So a small wad of paper unfolds and flips over to deliver a terrific wallop.

And as you read the poem, preferably aloud— as Corso himself does with a portion of it here,— you do feel percussed by the enormity of what your voice is conjuring, endlessly, without punctuation, till that mystical moment at Ground Zero when the world is changed forever. Your voice becomes a kind of echoing of the roar of the bomb itself.

But— and here begins the mystery, here begins “Bomb”’s appeal, here is why I sought out “Bomb” after being reminded that some people still think about detonating the so-called real thing. “Bomb’s” echo is loud for sure, but not with grim, solemn, grieving, accusatory, despairing, apocalyptic rage— or any other mood of desperation you’d associate with a poetic attempt to evoke its subject, or more accurately, to render that subject mimetically both in shape and in sound. No such hair-pulling frenzy is in question. Quite the opposite. Corso called “Bomb” his “love poem to the Bomb.” And that is what it is. A kind of wooing.

True, not every listener has felt “Bomb’s” amorous magic. Corso took heat from some readers of the poem because “Bomb” seemed sacrilegiously indifferent to its namesake’s menace. Those offended folks were, in a sense, right. “Bomb” is scary, as all explosions are,—not with horror, though, but with humor. Almost despite yourself you feel amused, even charmed and delighted by the poet’s antic refusal to treat the occasion with the usual fearful, mournful solemnity. And that’s before you even begin reading or chanting it. The shape itself is funny. It forces you to start your reading from the top of the mushroom cloud on the first side of the accordion page and wind down to Ground Zero on the other. So in a sense the direction of your reading is that of a film running backward. You end where you should have begun— or where the explosion itself began. It’s as if, at the end, everyone involved in the Manhattan Project has another chance to call the whole thing off.

Here are glimpses of the fun, beginning at the tippy-top of the puffy, woolly-lamb atomic cloud, the place where the explosion culminates but where your reading of the poem, topsy-turvily, begins:

                                                                       BOMB

Budger of history     Brake of time     You     Bomb

Toy of universe    Grandest of all snatched-sky    I cannot hate you

Do I hate the mischievous thunderbolt    the jawbone of an ass

The bumpy club of one million B.C.    the mace    the flail    the axe

Catapult Da Vinci    tomahawk Cochise    flintlock Kidd    dagger Rathbone

ah and the sad desperate gun of Verlaine    Pushkin    Dillinger    Bogart…

We begin, as bards in such situations do, with an apostrophe, a direct address to the deity, evoking its presence as the bard praises the deity’s salient qualities and, later, as he makes his appeal to her (or him, or, in this case, it). Each apostrophe is separated by several spaces, both to slow the voice at this point and to suggest, I think, the “puffiness” of the cloud’s visual effect.

But the separations also induce us to linger on each apostrophe so as to measure its weight. They turn out not to be as heavy as we expect. Try to measure the weight of the first one, “Budger of history.” “Budger of history”? Really? I thought The Bomb was a titanic earth shaker! “Budger” suggests that the Bomb has to strain to move the walnut clothes chest or the refrigerator just as you or I do. And what about “Brake of time”? I could have given weight to “Break” of time— that sounds appropriately apocalyptic. But “Brake” puts the Bomb in the same category as our 15 year old Volvo sedan. And the next apostrophe,“You” isn’t even an apostrophe. It’s just a shout-out. Like the next one, “Bomb.” I’m just trying to get the Bomb’s attention. But in a friendly, coaxing way, praising it by comparing its effect to a blow delivered by the “jawbone of an ass” or (my favorite) “dagger Rathbone.”

After the cloud-burst, the voice picks up its pace by tightening its lines as we sink down to enter the long, narrow, winding mushroom stem on our way to Ground Zero. We hear the poet singing as we ease down, continuing to bid it join all the other agencies of death, real ones, fictional ones— the whole panoply of devices, diseases, punishments, disasters that do no more nor less than the Bomb can do (i.e., kill us). All so that the Bomb can calm down, feel at home, because it is one of us now, irrevocably and forever.

So we will end where the real Bomb began, at Ground Zero. But by this time the Bomb has been charmed back to become “Bomb,” transformed into a glowing possibility, one powerful image among many, exorcised of its menace by a poet’s own competing explosion of whimsical humor, safely swaddled within metaphor as we come to rest at last on Ground Zero:

Know that the earth will madonna the Bomb

that in the hearts of men to come more bombs will be born

magisterial bombs wrapped in ermine    all beautiful

and they’ll sit plunk on earth’s grumpy empires

fierce with mustaches of gold

The rhythms of these compressed final four lines anchor the poem to solid earth. Strong dactyls slow the descent in the first line above, then spread out as we settle into a prophetic witness of bombs to come, divinely ordained, lordly— “wrapped in ermine”—, but inescapably comic as they “sit plunk on earth’s grumpy empire” like sulky children, “fierce with mustaches of gold” as if for a costume party they were forced to attend but can’t help enjoying.

Will a real Bomb drop again? Who can say. But it’s nice to think that the magic of “Bomb” has kept us happily distracted in the meantime.