For Lee Harvey Oswald
"Man was not born to solve the problem of the world, merely to discover where the problem lies."-- Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel / La Tabla de Flandes
With a Colt Cobra revolver in 1963,
Jack Ruby plugged you in the belly (aorta and kidney).*
You were killed, as JFK was—you’d blown his brain away;
you had some obsessive reason, though what no one can say.
You were young and foolish, you’d just turned twenty-four.
All this I’ve held onto those three score years no more.
There is no special logic: late on November 24
we were strolling in Marylebone, down Great Portland Street,
going to some trendy party—I had a girl to meet.
Someone told me what had happened, just a passing bore.
Why bring it up today then? You can write it off to age--
It’s not you I’m recalling, but remembering that page.
You cared about your Marina--a bit at any rate.
Did you know she remarried in a Texas town called Fate?
*On November 24, 1963, Ruby’s bullet “perforated the chest cavity, went through the diaphragm, spleen, and stomach. It cut off the main intestinal artery, and the aorta . . . as well as breaking up the right kidney.”--Attending surgeon quoted by Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK [New York: Random House, 1993], p. 397; the best book I’ve read on the subject.
11/24/2023