Zapruder Film Frame 150

Here comes authority, waving to the many,
riding with the few. Here comes smiling, shining you
driven down the ribbon of the end, alone in all that sun
and noise, those thousand hands and eyes and cameras.

Privy to Kruschev's breath, to Norma Jean's pink
desperate lips, Fort Knox and the Lincoln Bedroom,
and the ghost of Jefferson dining alone; privy to the football
with the pretty red button that kisses us goodbye.

Here comes the midnight-blue gigantic car, floating
on the pavement to the "X" that isn't there, the engine
sipping at the tank of Texas' inexhaustible elixir,
in the hidden engine block's bright myriad controlled explosions;

pistons firing, and the solar wind that douses everyone
invisibly blowing from the surface of the sun.

Zapruder Film Frame 172

II Samuel 11:24: And the shooters shot from off the wall
upon thy servants; and some of the king's servants be dead,
and thy servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also. Let go
of all this shrill romanticism and go wash your face.

If you can't with all your Freudian groping underneath
the floorboards find what this obsession stands for
you should replace it with a hobby like, say, gardening.
Dig, darling. Here's a little hand-held shovel

and a bag of special dirt. These are bulbs, there's rosemary,
that's for remembrance. You are angry with your mother.
You are sorry for your father. Feeling dead somehow,
you want to know who killed you. Punish those responsible.

You want to vindicate the great lost cause that is your life,
with illustrations for the Book of Job. Impossible.

Zapruder Film Frames 221 / 313

The head-sized patch of white behind the fence
still hovers in the Polaroid, the features so effaced
in all that coarse-grained old emulsion, nobody
can make out the amorphous spectral badge

and shoulder-patch of the "mechanic," now long dead
but then, mind blank in concentration, moving
all the world with that one finger. In frame two-twenty-one,
beside the Stemmons sign, eight spokes, phalanges

of that insane umbrella's great black hand unfold
and now in three-thirteen the rain of horizontal mercury and lead
invisible with speed, traverses half the plaza's sunlit day;
to bring to bloom red secret flowers on the throat

the upper back and one coronal open rose that showed
the planet what burst vertical and back across the street.