Apparition
Some time in the early sixties
Elvis was driving across the Texas Panhandle
along with his hair stylist/guru
on his way to Hollywood to make
yet another of those Hal B. Wallis crap movies
that it was trendy once to pretend to like
(He never flew.)
when they both looked up
and there in the big Texan sky
(in the heavens, if you will)
was a cloud in the exact form
of the face of Stalin.
No sooner had they mentioned this to each other
than a thunderbolt shot out of the cloud
narrowly missing their bus.
How does this fit in the greater scheme of things?
How does it compare
with the holy tomato of Huddersfield*,
the Mother Teresa cinnamon bun,
or, more importantly, with the hundreds
of recorded apparitions of Elvis’s face
on tortillas all over the Southwest?
Why, you may ask, did the lightning miss?
Or how good a hair stylist did you have to be?
(forgetting, for the moment, the guru bit)
There are so many unanswered questions.
Stalin, of course, never saw Elvis in a vision
or, if he had, he never mentioned it
and had the hair stylist/apparatchik removed.
The chronology was wrong, but 1956
had been the year of Krushchev’s biggest hit
and also of “Don’t be Cruel”.
Who was trying to tell whom what?
And am I being curmudgeonly to suggest
that it would be piss-weak by comparison
if Eminem saw Saddam in the clouds,
or even Kim Jong Il, who actually has
all those Hal B. Wallis movies on video?
*The holy tomato of Huddersfield
needs a poem of its own.
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