Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

My college girlfriend loved John F. Kennedy. She was a Political Science major. We both grew up in homes where a portrait of Kennedy soberly hung on a wall next to a picture of Martin Luther King — I didn’t share her obsession, but I was in the same boat of respect and appreciation. One year she organized a trip over spring break to Hyannis Port — I know, not exactly Cancún.

We left on a Friday, just in time for rush hour traffic. When we crossed the George Washington Bridge, the large sign “New England Thruway” appeared, and it hit me that I had never traveled north beyond New York City. We arrived in Cape Cod close to midnight. The next day, we grabbed coffee at a diner and drove immediately to the JFK Memorial looking out onto Lewis Bay. In gray morning light, the memorial was…nondescript. I think we were expecting an eternal flame instead of a stone wall with a medallion of Kennedy’s profile.

My girlfriend stood in silence and cried, as so many had that fateful day in Dallas, TX. I watched her shiver. I stared out into the distance at the Atlantic Ocean with gulls screeching overhead.

I watched waves repeatedly crash on the shore. I pondered our nation’s history, particularly, the arrival of the ship carrying Pilgrims to nearby Plymouth and the subsequent, devastating loss of life to the Wampanoag and Nauset peoples from violent colonization. I pondered the arrival of more ships and the enslavement of Africans in America, and the whaling ships and the harpooning of whales. There in Hyannis, I connected Kennedy’s tragic death with the waves of violence that mark our country and thought how the sea holds these histories.

For years, I returned to Cape Cod in the summer to write and make art, beset by its restorative light and its sacred past. Today’s poem makes use of the ocean as a paradoxical symbol of healing and regeneration yet, too, a site of debris and decay.

Cliché
by V. Penelope Pelizzon

Its back and forth, ad nauseum,
ought to make the sea a bore. But walks along the shore

cure me. Salt wind’s the best solution for
dissolving my ennui in,

along with these protean
sadnesses that sometimes swim

invisibly
as comb-jelly

a glass or two of wine below my surface.
Some regrets

won’t untangle. Others loosen as I watch the waves
spreading their torn nets

of foam along the sand
to dry. I walk and walk and walk and walk, letting their haul

absorb me. One seal’s hull
scuttled to bone staves

gulls scream
wheeling above. And here … small, diabolical,

a skate’s egg case,
its horned purse nested on pods of bladder-wort

that still squirt
brine by the eyeful. Some oily slabs of whale skin, or

—no, just an 
edge of tire

flensed from a commoner leviathan.
Everywhere, plastic nurdles gleam

like pearls or caviar
for the avian gourmand

and bits of sponge dab the wounded wrack-line,
dried to froths of air

smelling of iodine. 
Hours blow off down the beach like spindrift,

leaving me with an immense
less-solipsistic sense

of ruin, and, as if
it’s a gift, assurance

of ruin’s recurrence.

"Cliché" by V. Penelope Pelizzon from A GAZE HOUND THAT HUNTETH BY THE EYE © 2024 V. Penelope Pelizzon. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.