.................................
Memory Play for One Voice
.................................

Barry Goldwater was the first politician
I saw in person, in a motorcade on US 31,
South Bend, the year after Kennedy died.

It makes me feel old, somehow,
like carressing the Muses' golden hair
without memory and context what art

can be created or history understood,
the black closed car speeding down
US 31 the way the crowd stood

so close to the curb for months Barry's young
leonine face and Johnson's craggy
slab of chin and will butted up against

each other on newspages
concerned a lot with this
unknown place in Southeast Asia

and the getting down of maps
to see just where Vietnam was
and wondering what we were doing there

the ink ran red for eight more years
and if Goldwater wasn't right
he wasn't so far wrong and so the

saying how the Pentagon refights the last
war and LBJ did just what people
feared Goldwater would, just stretched

it out agonizingly for so many for
years. And it was probably a beautiful
fall day Goldwater's motorcade thinking

about his speech or next stop or
does this next town have any good food
or running short of ad money

and the leaves just starting to turn
the election two months away
the polls had him far behind

and what am I even doing in this
union town, hating the smell of a loser
he showered often but the sympathy

vote for LBJ and the damn Grand
old Putzes party keeping their
distance after he swept through

the convention at least he'd always
have that flashbulb night, if he lived, oLord,
to the year 2000 impossible to imagine

that far ahead he'd always remember
that night not bad for the son of store-owner
who'd started by cleaning up corrupt Phoenix

city politics, the integrity of: never afraid to speak
his mind, and if that made a person lose
the presidency, well, to hell with this country then.

.................................
Perry Sams
.................................

 
Copyright © Perry Sams
June 1998

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Created 1998/4/28. Updated last on 2000/7/17.