Limousine, Midnight Blue

by Jamey Hecht

Overview

This sequence of fifty 14-line poems uses the Zapruder Film of President Kennedy's murder as a prism through which to view America and the world. Refracted rays touch on crime and punishment; guilt and responsibility; charisma and love; the dying victim's experience during the stretched-out seconds of his violation and death; and the dark world of war profiteering, narco-traffic, and deceit where the facts of power determine history. Epic tradition (e.g., Homer, Dante, Milton) shares these pages with science, religion, and popular culture, now funny and now horrifying. Limousine, Midnight Blue is a haunted book about a haunted film of an event whose hungry ghosts still walk the American unconscious, rattling their chains louder every year.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597091282
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	02/15/2009
Edition description:	1
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Jamey Hecht was born in 1968, between the murders of Dr. King and RFK. He’s the author of Plato’s Symposium: Eros and the Human Predicament (Twayne, 1999) and a translation, Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the Tyrant, Oedipus at Colonus (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 2004). He has edited the books Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil by Michael C. Ruppert, and Someone Would Have Talked: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Conspiracy to Mislead History by Larry Hancock. Jamey Hecht has covered Peak Oil and geopolitics at www.fromthewilderness.com, and has taught world literature at various universities. His PhD is from Brandeis, where he wrote on Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas. Hecht’s poetry and prose have been published in a variety of scholarly journals and literary magazines. www.jameyhecht.com

Table of Contents

Table Of Contents

  

Acknowledgements                                                                                          iii

Note to the Reader                                                                                           v

Glossary                                                                                                           vi

Z-150:   Here comes authority, waving to the many                                             1

Z-151:   Sure, it’s pretty much the same, but now                                               2

Z-152:   At this point, Oswald opens wide his mouth and lunges                          3

Z-153:   At eighteen frames per second, now we’re a half a second                     4

Z-154:   So far, so good.  This being a Lincoln                                                    5

Z-155:   Steady as she goes.  This is about three feet forward                             6

Z-156:   Aristotle taught Athens and the world about                                           7

Z-157:   The frames are a deck of cards, or they are stars                                   8

Z-158:   I know something you don’t know                                                        9

Z-159:   Now we’re getting somewhere.  Life’s a fence-mending                        10

Z-160:   Parallel universe, my ass.  Everybody knows                                         11

Z-161:   Sometime between A.D. 161 and 303, Saint Cecilia                              12

Z-162:   Gentlemen, man your lenses                                                                  13

Z-163:   How about the triple underpass as the cervix of the world                      14

Z-164:   This is a race between the sound of my voice                                         15

Z-165:   By now it should be clear to you, the film                                               16

Z-166:   Richard Helms, James Jesus Angleton                                                   17

Z-167:   You were warned and went down anyway and now                              18

Z-168:   What walks on four legs in the morning                                                  19

Z-169:   Tell me, Muse, of that man of many turns                                               20

Z-170:   If you’re so smart, John Kennedy, what’s gravity?                                 21

Z-171:   Come as you are.  At the Resurrection, you won’t need                         22

Z-172:   II Samuel 11:24: And the shooters shot from off the wall                        23

Z-173:   Let’s say I am going to a banquet, and I plan                                         24

Z-174:   Let’s camp here for the night.  Under the elms                                       25

Z-175:   Hand, wave your last.  This is my final smile                                           26

Z-176:   In the race I run with my adrenal glands, I win                                       27

Z-177:   If you see the Buddha on the road, well, you know                                28

Z-178:   Whatever it was, it’s over now                                                              29

Z-179:   Suppose you’re in a spaceship and you go outside                                 30

Z-180:   Though Nietzsche doesn’t die till 1900                                                  31

Z-181:   This is my reluctance to decide, coiling around                                      32

Z-182:   Someday, when this same thing happens to you                                     33

Z-183:   In a democracy, everyone is the President.                                            34

Z-184:   When you’re five and you have to go to bed                                          35

Z-185:   After my hundred-eighty-fifth millennium                                                36

Z-186:   Now why would anybody want to kill little ole me?                                37

Z-187:   Homer doesn’t mention it was raining when Apollo                                38

Z-188:   Death when it comes will have the sun’s light fingers                               39

Z-189:   King Arthur and his chambermaid that stained                                       40

Z-190:   Another photo soon, where like a patient scrutinized                              41

Z-191:   Blur.  The frame is frozen solid, hanging somewhere                              42.

Z-192:   Imagine me riding skeletal down Main Street on a bicycle                      43

Z-193:   Just about now, the fellow on the underpass                                          44

Z-194:   Throat, back, back of the head, front of the head                                   45

Z-195:   Listen to the poet, reader so dear to me                                                46

Z-196:   Another blurry one.  Old man Zapruder had his hand                             47

Z-197:   What comes through me now?  These seeds of hell                                48

Z-198:   Welcome, master of inevitable closure come to kill me.                          49

Z-221 / Z-313:   There is no picture of the shooter at the picket fence.                50

Editorial Reviews

Ovid himself might have taken notice of this volume.  It's one thing to turn a woman into a tree, another more advanced thing to transform fifty frames of the Zapruder film into as many sonnets.  LIMOUSINE, MIDNIGHT BLUE is a radical display of poetry's ability to freeze time, to catch fugitive—and here, disputed—moments in the 

amber of form.
—-Billy Collins

From the Publisher