ODE TO CONNIE FRANCIS AS THE U.S. BANKING SYSTEM COLLAPSES
In the midst of a typically
American money crisis,
in which we all
all of a sudden find
slippery strangers
in the Capitol
and in our own
bathroom mirrors,
Linh Dinh—a poet
born in a far-off
country ravaged
by one of our most
famous wars—posts
on his blog a blurry
slide show: gorgeous
old-time photos
of Connie Francis;
they parade before us
as she bitter-sweetly
sings. I look and listen
through the dark
backward and abysm
of time till that first
time comes back:
a buddy’s older
brother’s car parked
at The Scotchman (our
local drive-in eatery),
windows rolled down
for car-hop service
and to let in
the neon-rinsed
summer night breeze,
and in the back seat
me and my pal
sipping Hot Kookies
(Scotchman lingo
for the sugary-cold
fire of cinnamon Cokes),
when all of a sudden
Connie’s voice fountains
from the Chevy’s radio,
straight into the veins
of my childhood. A real
childhood, I’d dearly
like to believe,
in a real America—
though in truth
Eisenhower’s CIA
had been at work
for three years already
in Vietnam; and the very
next year our D-Day hero
would fly off to Spain
for photo-ops with Franco,
as James Wright noted—
back when poets
could remind us how
well we’d learned to love
the company of fascists,
without their poems
being hectored
out of the Canon.
America, I do not call
your name without hope—
thanks not to the elite
that governs us,
but to the likes
of Connie Francis,
who was really—Linh
tells me—Concetta
Rosa Maria Franconero,
from Newark, whose voice
got me high at age eight,
and even now
sweetens my dream
of you, you sad
corrupted nation,
whose true anthem
isn’t after all that rowdy
British drinking song
with lyrics by a lawyering
rhymester, but songs
like Connie’s—born
(like my mother) in 1923,
in the roiling wake
of the First World War,
and still being sung
after the Second,
as it surely will be sung
in the shadow of the Third:
Who’s Sorry Now?
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