Two
poems from Jamey Hecht's Limousine, Midnight Blue: Fifty
Frames from the Zapruder Film
followed
by a note on the author
Z
- 155
Steady
as she goes. This is maybe three feet down
the road from where we were. Excruciating, isn't it?
Nailing him this slowly is barbaric, but that's cinema:
The tiny dark blue car is dust and plastic in my VCR.
New
money shoots toward Heaven from a punctured hill.
The algal blooms of 90 million years ago have turned
to bitumen and kerogen and fumes, and now like whiskey
in a still, it's transubstantiated into gold and burned.
Every
grain of silver nitrate on this frame of film
once lay undiscovered in the dark below the mine.
The very gasoline was once alive. And those are pearls
that were his shining eyes, and dirt that was his face.
Look:
Love is tugging backward on the limousine,
while murder effortlessly moves it into place.
Z
- 192
Imagine
me riding skeletal down Main Street on a bicycle.
I get death, you get the shock of your lives, your daughters
heroin addicts and your sons marines on fire in mud, guilty.
I am pedaling through perfect silence in the capital
of
Dixie. Spit on the street when you mention me.
This Site Possesses National Significance
In Commemorating The History Of The United States
of America. 1993. National Park Service. United States
Department
of the Interior.
You rape my brain,
I haunt you. All my unfinished work impossible,
the very thought of me ridiculous, become an airport,
fried chicken, documentaries. Salute your Nazis.
Operation
Paperclip. Go look it up. And while you die,
I and my midnight blue and silver bicycle go by.
©
Jamey
Hecht’s essays have appeared in scholarly and popular journals
from ELH and the Massachusetts Review to www.fromthewilderness.com
and the Progressive Populist. His two books to date are
Plato’s Symposium: Eros and the Human Predicament
(Twayne, 1999) and Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays: Translated,
with an Introduction and Notes (Wordsworth Editions, 2004).
His fiction and poetry have appeared in Free Inquiry,
Sundry, River City, the Sycamore Review,
Block, and Black Warrior Review. Originally from
New York, he now lives in Los Angeles with his daughter and
a cat. Website: www.jameyhecht.com.
