Sitting on the Veterans' Memorial at the Corner of Main Street and Route 22, July 3, 1972, Not Thinking About Walter Cronkite.

Bishop, James Gleason

Sitting on the Veterans' Memorial at the Corner of Main Street and Route 22, July 3, 1972, Not Thinking About Walter Cronkite Someone was lying. On TV, shells burst in jungles, body counts distorted nightly. Police clashed with students clashed with professors clashed with blacks clashed with whites. Drugs drugs drugs. I saw it all on TV But not on Main Street in Essex, not in the softwood aisles of Harold Tart's Grocery Store amid pyramids of dusty cans. Not on the granite memorial-- gray, unpolished headstone, mass grave for three wars' worth-- which I sat on 'til a dark-eyed man from the fire department marched across Route 22. How would you like it if someone sat on your memorial? I don't think I'd care, if I were dead, I said. He growled, Get down. So I watched the black and white screen, heard the black and white screams. Then Phil Tate came home from Nam smiling beneath his leather hippie hat with dangly strands. The Tater didn't look scarred. Someone was lying, and I suspected Phillip.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL JAMES GLEASON BISHOP'S work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Connecticut Review, North American Review, Smithsonian, Yankee, The Boston Globe, and Christianity and Literature. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is an assistant professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy.