The Reagan Memorial Poem

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Mr. President, even before your last round-up in the sky,
I saw your spirit drifting proudly along your freeways,
through your schools and over your own aircraft carrier,
the planes taking off and disappearing like many facts.
Though at first, given your political & medical history,
the "Reagan-Memorial" anything seemed in poor taste,
bowing to peer pressure, I offer this memorial poem.

I saw your funeral in the National Cathedral, the camera at a bird's-eye angle
the same as God must've had: A ring of mourners around your casket,
the mise-en-scène as if by Busby Berkeley (I know you would've liked that).
Your coffin sat to the bottom of the encircling crowd, so
your funeral looked like the smiley face gone seriously blind.

How appropriate, I thought, not the blindness,
but the respectful space around your coffin,
for it was there the ghosts began to drift:
                            the Iranians whom Iraq gassed with military aid you
                            initiated over Amnesty International's cries. Listen,
                            we can still hear them weeping for Kurds, Kuwaitis and,
                            of course, our own. How good of you to sit up and
                            salute them. That meant so much.

                            Then came the Nicaraguenses, some carrying their diaphanous limbs
                            lopped off by the contras. In an act of forgiveness they piled the nipples,
                            cocks, balls, noses, eyes, ears and tongues around your coffin,
                            their bodies no longer necessary.

                            The Salvadoreños wearing neutralized expressions followed
                            the Afghanis whom your freedom fighters liberated from life and
                            any happiness not allowed by a literal reading of the Koran.

                            Finally, the Guatamaltecos-the largest genocide in the Western
                            Hemisphere in the 20th Century-crowd comfortably around
                            your coffin; they've been practicing in mass graves at least since
                            you initiated military aid in 1981, one of your first presidential acts.

Did you recognize the ghost of Bishop Juan Gerardi?
                             You were deep in the delusions of Alzheimer's in '98 when
                             a graduate of Fort Benning's School of the Americas
                             bludgeoned Bishop Gerardi for counting Guatemala's dead.
                             Genocide plus one.
It was so big of you not to make a fuss when Gerardi helped you from your coffin
and forgave you for not remembering what you did,
you not being Catholic or even asking forgiveness and all.

I suppose it makes sense, them filling your coffin with their broken bodies
so they could glide beside you as you rode behind your caisson,
the nation honoring you in death as you had lived:
remembering nothing but good things:
                             how you held the picket line at the Warsaw shipyards,
                             how you stared down the Kremlin guards who held you hostage,
                             how you freed Tibet and personally piloted the Dali Lama home
                                                                                                     on Air Force One.

It must have been at that moment of the procession,
you riding backwards but comfortable in your old boots,
all of us suffering Alzheimer's in sympathy with you,
that your mind was healed and you understood you were on your way to heaven,
to spend eternity with the ghosts flowing beside you,
and that was when you began to cue the horse back
along the trail, so the bullets become dollars that
became the ink in the pen in your hand.
God bless that horse, even with you sitting backwards in the saddle like that,
it wanted to obey your cues and turn away from the grave,
but, alas, the soldier leading it had other orders.