1957

I was asked to write a poem for the opening of an
art show in town celebrating the year 1957.
Seemed like a good chance to be playful. Here it
is, down Memory Lane, in long lines that the
blog refuses to indent to show continuity,
but you can't have everything, or
whatchagonnado?

1957

All that concerned me in 1957 was my sex life,
and we don't want to go there.

Meanwhile that year
Liz Taylor shifted from one marriage to another;
a brave little black girl and eight friends
faced down slavering bigots in Little Rock,
Arkansas;
and Mario A. Gianini died, the inventor of the
maraschino cherry.
(I googled to recapture the details).

Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize in 1957
while In Tulsa, Oklahoma, they buried a brand
new Chevy Belvedere in a time capsule,
an atomic-bomb-proof vault under the lawn
of the Tulsa County Courthouse
along with some gasoline in case that fuel would
have disappeared from human memory by 2007
when the car was found blessedly safe from the
bomb but ruined by water seepage
and having no need for the thoughtfully supplied
gasoline.

Oh, and on Saturday October 5th of that Wunderyahr,
in game three of the World Series, a Yankee rookie
named Kubek,
provided two home runs against the Braves,
great stuff for a rookie, Kubek in fact
declared Rookie of the Year, and where is he now?

Oh, wait, lest we forget, the day before Game Three
the Soviets scared us shitless by launching Sputnik
and sending the country into an overdrive of strive
that still shows no sign of abating to this very day.

I noted all these happenings and more, of course,
back in '57;
I reacted, I babbled, I opined,
but my real interest was my sex life, should I be
ashamed to tell you that?
Should I lie and say that Sputnik or Kubic or the
Nobel prize
took the dominant seat in my consciousness
a while?
Or Liz Taylor? Or the Chevy Belvedere?