Heavier than Air

Heavier than Air

for Fritz Haber

He tautened, tightened and synched

the air, ratcheted in nitrogen and

found in the space the slow drop of ammonium

nitrate, the fuel that would keep a billion modern people from starving.

His glass of fine wine was lifted among

the highest societies a poor German Jew

from the country could pull himself up to,

but he yearned for higher air than the liquid

that shook life from the earth

to feed his generation of plants.

_________________________He longed for Goddom.

He rallied and lead a field of soldiers, squaring

off in the first big war of the modern

age. While Klimt painted the lovers softly, adoring eachother

in gold and maroon, Fritz Haber gave the order for the chlorine gas,

a similar invention to ammonium nitrate, to be let

loose slowly over the field at Ypres. It was early spring.

There must have been birds singing as the dawn broke.

Fog mixed with fog and heavier than air, gas

dropped into the trenches where men were lifted out of

their skins to the sensation of drowning on dry land, drowning

in their own lungs, heaving, convulsing, retching, tearing at their skin

falling back to the earth to feed the field with their blue bodies.

When he arrived home, his wife, a scientist surrounded

by men, said what he did was wrong. I don't know

what else she said before he left the next morning

to command troops and gas, before she walked into the garden

behind their house, before she rested a pistol to her chest, the

cold iron on the shallow part of her breast, before she aimed

straight for her own heart and fired, before he heard the sound,

found her body and took his pistol back, before he left her there

to get the train, before his young son wandered alone

in the garden, wondering what had happened to his mother,

his son who would years later walk down that same hedgerow

as his mother and end his candle with his own two fingers.

And after Fritz Haber tried and failed

to ransack gold from the saltwater of tides

to pay his part of the colossal debt of the Fatherland

he went toe-to-toe with the Nazi laws of

1934 and resigned rather than sack his

Jewish contemporaries, some of whom were no doubt

present the first time a pesticide was synthesized,

a pesticide easily lethal to humans. The chemists conspicuously

added a smell so farmers could avoid the toxic gas

but a later, more dedicated group of chemists

removed the smell, and updated the recipe name to Xyclon-B.