'But O the Heavy Change, Now Thou Art Gone'

No public event has shaken me so lastingly as the assassination of President Kennedy. I’m not speaking sentimentally, mourning the glory that was Camelot. JFK was a mediocre president, at best, and not a good man. 

I had turned eleven a month before his murder. The killing taught me that everyone was vulnerable, even the most powerful and protected man in the world. I don’t mean that in the personal sense. I haven’t spent the last sixty-two years trembling with paranoia. I’m talking about history. No one is immune to its machinations. Few things last.

 

The way I learned of the assassination seems significant. Ron Ornsby and I were in the same sixth-grade class and had walked to our Safety Patrol post, carrying our flags and wearing Sam Browne belts. A driver stopped to tell us the president had been shot. Soon after, another driver stopped to say Kennedy had been touring a nut house in Texas when one of the nuts shot him. How odd that a surreally attenuated rumor should ring with poetic truth. When I walked in the back door at home, I could see the silhouette of my mother crying in front of the television. For the next three days we were forbidden to play outside and spent most of the time watching the news from Dallas and Washington, D.C. In memory, it’s all in black and white.

 

R.L. Barth has written a new sequence of poems, “Aspects of Vietnam,” with an epigraph from The Great Gatsby: “borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The first poem in the series, “The Fall of Camelot,” also has an epigraph: “Beware angering the goddess”:

 

“Did you anticipate the fallout, John,

When Diem and Nhu were murdered in Saigon?

In Dallas almost three weeks later, Jack,

Nemesis tracked you down and paid you back.”

 

Twenty years ago I interviewed a computer scientist at Rice University who was dying of cancer and, coincidentally, was named Kennedy. Once handsome and quite the lady’s man, he was now a baggy suit on a rack of bones. He had been an undergraduate at Rice, and on the day of the president’s assassination he was seated in an English literature class when news of the killing was announced. The professor had been lecturing on Milton. Unlike other professors, he didn’t cancel his class and, instead, read “Lycidas” aloud to his students. More than forty years later, the computer scientist recited for me, from memory:      

 

“But O the heavy change, now thou art gone,

Now thou art gone and never must return!”

 

He had tears in his eyes as he spoke the words, and three months later he was dead.