Poems by Barry Seiler

Compulsory Education

We wish to witness our own deaths
speeding toward us over the red bricks of Queens.
We stand at the classroom windows
cracking wise, placing bets
on who will be first to spot the missiles.
We have the untested truth that we will die and survive.
We know how Americans handle these scenes,
with irony and elbows hard to the ribs,
meaning get it, get it.
On the ledge pigeons move from window
to window pecking pebbles. Old Mr. Hurley,
our ancient Irish Spanish teacher
slams each window shut to make a point.
The pigeons squawk and move along.
His favorite joke is to ask a girl whose name
is stitched on her blouse above her breast
what the other one is called.
He spits out syllable by bloody syllable
his curse on all children: Sacramento California.
In those waning days of duck and cover
I  listened to the Cuff Links
doowopping Guided Missiles:
Guided missiles bound to explode.
It came to me as we looked to the skies,
an oldie, a blast from the past
as the jocks liked to say.
What I thought was a tune about the Cold War
turning hot and violent I understood a few years later
was a man and woman at war; one lover warning
a cruel and destructive other: the same guided missiles
will get you in the end.

William McKinley Walks Our Way

I could spend days before the screen,
content to watch the dead cavort,
moving at their odd endearing speeds.        

Moments ago, I saw Edwin Porter’s reenactment
of the assassination of William McKinley
filmed at the behest of Thomas Edison.         

Before that I watched his funeral on You Tube.
How carefully the great man’s body
was loaded onto a horse-drawn wagon.   

What tender regard the dead show each other
when they think no one is looking. And now
here he comes, live and in person,    

coming our way down from the famous front porch
in the late summer light of 1896,
alive as any of us, into our living rooms,       

the first filmed political commercial.
His belly gently spreads before him,
a continent of contentment.

Billy Bitzer is directing him,
Griffith’s cameraman on Birth of a Nation,
urging him to walk our way. McKinley

crosses the lawn in purposeful strides.
He wants to give our hand a manful shake,
reaching his hand through the screen

across the damaged years.
He removes his hat and pats his brow.
Look at that large head! It fills the screen

pushing the townspeople to the edge,
pushing all of us to the edge
in this century of large heads.