Washington, Then and Now - Day 16 - Sara Dowse

Two memories of the capital

honed through the years,

polished to a purpose.

This being the function of memory –

ugly word, function – but then,

these emerge from frightening times.

Imagine seeing a fretful face

through folds of scratched plastic.

Could be the plastic,

bending things.

My aunt’s face, blurred

in memory, framed in plastic,

glimpsed through fever

raging in the capital or,

to be exact, a suburb nearby.

Sweltering it was down on the Potomac.

Airconditioning a novelty

that Gore Vidal

the sharpest of American chroniclers said

changed everything in Washington,

the town was different when

the summer was bearable,

the government stayed and drummed up things,

was better, less dangerous, he said

when they skedaddled

and came back cooled down.

Black hair, a voice like apple sauce

my aunt, a hostess in that postwar town.

There would be houses all over the country

tracts of them for the returned soldiers

my uncle, her husband, announced.

In my tent swimming in oxygen

was it my throat or my mind

that was inflamed?  Perhaps my heart,

for here it was, a summer fluttering,

at the brink or who really knows? the cusp.

Fast forward.  Many years.

Interns at a feeding frenzy.

A visitor, and no one in this vast

hall knows that I was here

before the airconditioning,

before such hunger was allowed.

When we believed

in brave new worlds, above all fair ones,

homes and jobs, appliances and cars.

(Hard to credit now.) 

Next a president, a black one,

went forth to beg, all over again, 

all over the country

for solid dreams trashed then set aside.

Artfully arranged: the wheels of cold cuts,

the crusty breads and patés

and the women, slender, coiffed,

crushed against the tables,

mascara running

as they voraciously chew.

So this is what he meant, that most trenchant

of chroniclers, saddest of commentators,

about refrigeration

and how it changed the town.

My fretful aunt and her visionary husband

have left for a place they had spared me

that hot summer.  How they might marvel

at the simpler oxygen – a tube, a tank.

How they must wonder

looking down on the capital

that a wheelchaired leader’s courage

was forgotten, and all we can do

down on the ground here

is start all over again.