Captain Video, 1952
After school, it thundered in on Wagner’s
“Flying Dutchman Overture.” OK, maybe
it sputtered some on 25-bucks-a-week,
the Captain and the Video Ranger wearing
ski goggles on painted football helmets
to battle histrionic villains on cloth planets.
But so what if Mars was a drawing
on a canvas flat, also Venus, Neptune
et. al. And who cared that controls
on the Captain’s ship, Galaxy II, featured
a TV screen small as ours, a lever,
and several wheels, all on another flat,
that a midway filler flipped to oater serials:
Riders of Death Valley, Deadwood Dick,
or that our Captain wound up demoted
to dentist in a toothpaste ad and his Ranger
from cosmic duty to daytime soaps.
On the Galaxy’s interrupted flights, I swear
we conquered space. And saved the earth.
I remember. I was there.
At Military School
It was my first teaching job, English comp
to three sections of uniformed rejects, whom
parents didn’t want to deal with: slackers,
delinquents, droopy sad sacks. In a school
that looked like a fortress, they were marched
to martial tunes in dress that looked
more student prince than military.
Grades were rigged to humor parents,
who’d find their flunky son had become
a scholar and a gentleman, reviewed
in close order drill instead of lineups.
On weekends, some got passes to be bussed
in uniform 20 miles to a college town,
where they stood on corners, getting cat calls
from frat boys in convertibles, cold shoulders
instead of dates. There was a suicide,
maybe from the bullying. They graduated
bitter, angry, and good with a gun.
William Trowbridge’s ninth poetry collection, Call Me Fool, came out from Red Hen Press in September. Over 550 of his poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines and in more than 50 anthologies and textbooks. He is a faculty mentor in the University of Nebraska-Omaha Low-residency MFA in Writing Program and was Poet Laureate of Missouri from 2012 to 2016. For more information, see his website at williamtrowbridge.net