About the Dead: Poems

Trivial Pursuit

[60] T r i v i A L P U r S U i T it’s good, you think, to feel those old synapses hustling to get in line for roll call as your mother-in-law clears the table and offers another beer. Has anyone seen Hirohito, Steeplechase, Polio, the Warsaw Pact? An aging battalion whistled back from an almost permanent shore leave, everyone heavy around the midsection; only half of the state capitals even bothered to show up and none of the Oscar winners from 1965–1985. Then, before you know it, Alan Shepard is rocketed back onto the moon driving golf balls into the horizon— How many of them landed in a bunker?—Australopithecus holds up two fingers, shrugs, and sinks back into the fold. you can hear Bessie Smith warming up with Guns n’ roses, while rome and Carthage are reenacting the Punic Wars. What’s the world’s largest political party? What’s a marsupial’s marsupium better known as? How many of every ten cats will survive a six-story fall? nine Chinese communist pouches to be exact, shouts the Aegean Sea. By now, you’re throwing bull’s-eyes blindfolded and things are getting interesting. Tammy Faye Baker’s tattooed eyebrows are learning to play a five-string banjo while the War of 1812 French-kisses Jupiter, and Margaret Thatcher poses for the cover of Sports Illustrated. Sure, you could try and put a stop to it, send everyone slogging away like melancholic whores, useless, half-remembered, but you still haven’t decided which one has the most chromosomes—a turkey, a hermit crab or a human? And wouldn’t you like to know. ...