A poem a day in April from Rutgers English PhD students and friends.

Monday, April 6, 2015

The Last Season, April 5, 2015

An Occasional Poem

Connecticut, 2007
Seeing Betty’s canapés, my mom says, we ate canapés 
Just like those, off plates just like that

New York, 2008
They tell me while I'm sitting in the back of the car.
“This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened"
Not this, which is still happening

New Jersey, 2009
It's 1963 on TV.
Back in Connecticut, a scrapbook in the attic,
Record of a teenage girl’s JFK fan club

New Jersey, 2010
Of course Don marries Megan, says my mom, she is so good with the children

2011
Things go dark

New York, New Jersey 2012
My mom would have loved the first Jewish employee

New Jersey, 2013
My mom always said cruise ships were the perfect place for murder

England, 2014
The first time I watch alone
Knees up in a narrow room
Still daylight
The sea just at the end of the street
Taking the TV cure in Brighton

New York, 2015
Waiting for the download
Will I see her in Peggy? Megan? Betty? Sally?
Or in the things-- we had those, we did this, I remember that

6 comments:

  1. <3 <3 Mad Men/all tv shows /seriality as time travel to/with the people you experienced them with! But Mad Men specifically as travel to our parents' secrets. xoxoxoxox

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  2. Love this so much. <3
    (Also, can I see that scrapbook?)

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  3. Yay! And yes-- scrapbook visit next beach day, if not before. I need to figure out how to preserve it...

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  4. I just got that it's a _JFK_ fan club (somehow glossed over that before, as just scrapbook/fanclub/60s.) WOW.

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  5. End of an Era, New York, May 17, 2015

    This one I watched live,
    The first time in years,
    And, like most of this final season, alone.

    At the end of the week,
    We’ll watch as a trio (musketeers!),
    With cocktails and canapés and the dongle, this time.

    But tonight, it’s just me.
    Knees up, but with plenty of room.
    I didn’t watch for Don. I watched for Peggy, Sally, Joan. Me. My mom.

    Why was Betty ever doing this?
    Taking classes at Fairfield University
    Just like my mom.

    Sally at the sink. She will watch her mother die.
    Smoking through her cancer: Go, Betty.
    Mine would have laughed.

    Peggy and Stan: a dream-sequence, of course.
    Holloway Harris though: that’s the way to
    Take two names, and make it real.



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