Key West, Florida—Midnight

                 …proclaim the territory of Hawaii to be the 50th of our           United States.

                       Dwight David Eisenhower, August 21, 1959

We gather at the old buoy grounded

at the end of Third Street

near the water-lapped rocks, its yellow-lettered

SOUTHERNMOST POINT IN THE USA

still proud and true. Tinny voices

spew out of red plastic in Nancy’s hand—

Buddy Holly—Missile Gap—Fidel.

News: Honolulu tells of reveling mobs,

outrigger canoes, roast suckling pigs, surfboards,

girls in grass skirts, drinks in coconut shells as big

as somebody’s head, skywriting, and smoke flares

shot off in pre-dusk light. In our own moist air

we count the final minutes and seconds

of our Southernmost Point, knowing not

an atom will be lost, no life will cease, yet something

will pass from this place, like glassy light gone out

from a streetlamp smashed. The hulking steel

will stay, but something within

its multi-coats of paint

will instantly transport itself to lodge

inside some surf-bathed chunk of pahoehoe

in the tropical Pacific. Larry holds his kid,

who bats it with a cool blue hula hoop.

We all, fifteen or so, touch to feel the buoy change,

like medieval alchemists watching

the scale on which they put a dying man to learn

the weight of the soul that departs at death.

Cheek and ear on painted metal, I hear

the mingled song of human touches

and incessant stirring of the waves

within the great gray-black mass that goes

south to the flat horizon and beyond.

John Nimmo