Truth went through a leaky funnel starting in late 1963
that blade-lit afternoon Gary Orrin laughed at Kennedy’s murder
bleeding through the static of P.S. 41’s cheap PA. There’s Greenwich Village—
a drowsy dandelion—I called it once—and there
are the heartsick monitors of afternoons.
My mother is late to pick me up, again. She’s almost better,
but will never find a way to manage the cure. Outside American family life,
nothing happens for years until OJ’s glove: interspersed with some other
sloppy American truth. If I didn’t know everything I already know
I could count on the dog while she rifles through her morning bowl
in the next room. Poor Ruby. She knows more than I do.
She is eating the world to save it.
Copyright © 2017 by Michael Klein. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 30, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.