1% of Americans were having sex
with the television on
and continued having sex
even after learning about Dallas.
When they finished, they lay in bed
public hair glistening in the November afternoon
and wondered what they had done.
Cindy Goff
poem from Appalachian Flood
Here's what I remember.
ReplyDeleteI don't remember an assassination. Several days later, I was mysteriously not in school. I and my brother and my father lay adrift at the Tip Top Trailer Court. Dad slept.
I and my brother, licked our hands from finger tip to palm, dipping our hands in coffee, and licking our hands again.
Then back the black and white television atop the fridge. Laying on the kitchen table, we watched John John and Caroline. I don't remember that famous salute. I had fallen in a five-year-old kind of way with Caroline. She was my television girlfriend, and we were the same age.
Only she was famous, and her father was famous. And though she probably had loved her father as much as I did mine, hers was dead, and mine laid in bed, a much younger man exhausted from third shift at the bomb factory.
Rex
Nice Rex.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't born yet, but JFK looms large for me.