3:35 pm - 4:35 pm, November 5, 1962 in Camelot

(the only hour on record when no one died)

This is an eternal hour of a fall day with no promises
to keep that you know of, no one making predictions
or prophecies about it on television or the street
corner. It is perfect, November, afternoon,
but you will barely hear a long-haired girl sing
“Blowing in the Wind” and look across an empty
college lecture hall at one black student, alone
as she is, because you are not there, you are only
watching a secret service film clip shot from outside
the only open door in Mississippi.

And tall, silver trees, lining Pennsylvania Avenue
since Lincoln’s day, dropping their last leaves
in a light breeze, hardly seem like the ominous weapons
of a few days ago to you, opening at this hour
the French doors overlooking the wide lawn,
because in your atonement you are remembering
a similar day last year, sailing in a golden bay
with your arm around someone never coming back,
and without the cool air blowing through the doors
or line of black limousines entering the gates,
your brief daydreaming would go unnoticed
in the black and white paparazzi photos.

This is how you might have written about this hour—
several pages have been excised from your journal—
this capital sky clearer than Seattle’s Space Needle
vision of the future, this Aquarian news of a man
one day sailing off in a space ship to the moon
where no one has ever been turned away or died.