THE DAILY SEDUCTION OF BEING THIS PERSON INCLUDES KNOWING MY MOTHER LOVED ME
Ray Charles singing “You Don’t Know Me” aside,
you can know someone. Call it experience him or her
or they. And that being true, I feel the daily seduction
of being this person and how it includes the information
my mother loved me—this American of a certain age
who advertisers ignore yet who lit up the Internet with
Whitman uploads to Facebook during the pandemic.
Ask yourself why a poem by Walt Whitman garners
significantly fewer Likes and Loves and Wows than
a black-and-white headshot of an infant grandson and
his mother. It says something good about us, doesn’t it,
when a mother loves her child and testifies to that love.
The kid will always have that against the indifference
and lukewarm reception the world offers each of us.
FEAR, SMOKING
Fear and smoking are the warnings for Rod Serling
and The Twilight Zone, black-and-white TV shows—
I was 5 in nineteen fifty-nine, what did I know?
After any frightening episode, I might lay awake,
my legs in the air above my bed in an acrobatic V,
Granny Potter slapping the soles of my bare feet,
comically, to distract me; first, from characters
prophesying thermonuclear war and annihilation.
Then, in the living room, she’d change channels
to The Billy Graham Crusade—the same world
but without Chesterfields and Rod Serling and
with Billy Graham befriending Richard Nixon:
Nixon opened China to God and the capitalists
who introduced Chesterfields to the Chinese and
slaughtered tens of millions—that Richard Nixon.
And if the moral arc of the Universe bends toward
justice, this according to Martin Luther King, Jr.,
then it must do so through a drift of smoke rings.
