Jimmy Carter Brought to the Capitol to Lie In State by Christine Potter
ONE ART
Jimmy Carter Brought to the Capitol to Lie In State
Wind yesterday, wind again today, strong enough to rock the thick, shaggy trunks of cedars. Dead leaves and bits of
paper rise in what sounds like surf—but no water. Sky’s a mean blue beyond the jangled, empty maples. Too bright
and cold. Cold wind. Shuffle-click of military shoes, body- bearers strapping the President’s casket covered with our
flag to a black caisson. The horses’ black necks curled like question marks in the white sun. Someone gravel-voiced
huffing orders. More wind. Hoof-clatter, columns, stone steps, a distant siren, an almost recognizable word caught
in the air, held aloft until it’s gone. One horse, riderless, waving its head. The first President I had been old enough
to vote for. His voice on the old-even-then black and white TV I’d repaired by replacing tubes. His serious Oval Office
camera-gaze, our sweet old world: blurry, glimmering. We paid for things with coins. We didn’t want war but hadn’t
won one recently. My father was out of work. Me, too. Dad and I drove to Unemployment together. Dad still liked him;
a President is a seat at the dinner table. How could we know the future and how distant it never was? The year I was born,
Jimmy Carter entered a melting-down nuclear reactor and repaired it, absorbing an entire year’s worth of radiation in
ninety seconds. He lived a century. Everything you’d never imagine happened. I never thought I’d cry for two whole days.
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Christine Potter is the poetry editor of Eclectica Magazine. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Rattle Poets Respond, Eclectica, ONE ART, Tar River Poetry, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The McNeese Review, Grain, and Consequence. Her full-length poetry collection, Unforgetting, is published by Kelsay Books and her time traveling young adult novels, The Bean Books, are on Evernight Teen. She lives in a very old house in the Hudson Valley with her husband and a chonky cat named Bella.
