Like the electric chair makes
        you remember your whole life.

        The barber snaps a white towel
        and turns it around your neck:

        You think back thirty-eight-years
        to another you, now dead really-

        a blood-soaked bundle
        as you lay under the Mercury

        bumper, thighbone turned up
        like a bullhorn. The same year,

        1963, another car,
        a Lincoln convertible, had

        magic seats too. When you first saw
        the Zapruder film decades later

        you had unmistakable deja vu:
        Dallas, where blood was as silver

        as scissors, sweet stud shimmering
        long before the lunar floor. You

        were in that glare. Not spectator.
        But in that Lincoln's back seat.

        Now, you smell his cologne and swear
        as electric shears buzz your temples:

        One small blast through the head of Man.
        You can even hear the sudden thuds,

        the lead shafts goring out the light,
        as the barber swivels the chair

        to the mirror and says, "Should I
        take more gray?" It's then you see

        the bloody, crumpled down dashboard
        over which your sexy young mother

        is buckled in horror, the father
        you thought would always be president,

        on the hood, hands and knees, swaying,
        head somehow sown into the wrinkled

        windshield. The barber says "Sorry."
        --There's blood on the towel.

        Says his shears have slit your ear.
        The barber's chair, like the electric

        chair, sends you everywhere at once.
        You were in Dallas that day.

        Not gawking from the sidewalk, not
        just walking by, pulling triggers

        or even taking snapshots. No,
        the whole family was packed

        into that big, beautiful Lincoln
        moving so slow, and then so fast.


Copyright © Kevin Dobbs, 2001.  All Rights Reserved.