Mary Jo Salter

 

John Lennon

The music was already turning sad, 
those fresh-faced voices singing in a round 
the lie that time could set its needle back 

and play from the beginning. Had you lived 
to eighty, as you'd wished, who knows?—you might 
have broken from the circle of that past 

more ours than yours. Never even sure 
which was the truest color for your hair 
(it changed with each photographer), we claimed 

you for ourselves; called you John and named 
the day you left us (spun out like a reel— 
the last broadcast to prove you'd lived at all) 

an end to hope itself. It isn't true, 
and worse, does you no justice if we call 
your death the death of anything but you. 


II 

It put you in the headlines once again: 
years after you'd left the band, you joined 
another—of those whose lives, in breaking, link 

all memory with their end. The studio 
of history can tamper with you now, 
as if there'd always been a single track 

chance traveled on, and your discordant voice 
had led us to the final violence. 
Yet like the times when I, a star-crossed fan, 

had catalogued your favorite foods, your views 
on monarchy and war, and gaily clipped 
your quips and daily antics from the news, 

I keep a loving record of your death. 
All the evidence is in—of what, 
and to what end, it's hard to figure out, 

riddles you might have beat into a song. 
A younger face of yours, a cover shot, 
peered from all the newsstands as if proof 

of some noteworthy thing you'd newly done.