Morning in America


What draws you to them at first is the nicknames 
they have for each other and their little jokes, like 
the remark the woman makes to her co-host 
about his tie, then apologizes and even touches it 
so she seems to more than like him, and why not, 

he’s handsome in a regular-guy, unthreatening 
sort of way, and when they all come back 
from a commercial, you almost wonder whether 
the blonde who does the news might be a little 
jealous, given how she keeps it up about the tie,

or maybe you think just for an instant, how is it 
possible for him to watch her all dressed up in her 
serious costume to read the news each morning 
and not sometimes think of her “in that way,” 
but when you happen to catch it the next morning 

she brings in pictures of her baby, and you say 
wait a minute, she has a whole other life 
off the set, this is a job and these people 
are professionals, the newswoman herself, 
for openers, reading right through the bad news 

about all the shoppers who blew up in the open 
market in Iraq and the shocking statistics about 
obesity in the United States, unable no matter
how hard she tries to avoid a touch of sadness 
on her face, as if what can she do besides continue 

to be thin and appealing herself, which is when 
you really appreciate the fat laughing guy 
who does the weather because you can be serious 
for just so long, and anyway there’s always a silver 
lining in every dark cloud, like he says, for instance 

the ones hovering right here over the Midwest,
gesturing toward the cloud graphic spinning 
into place, and even though everybody groans 
over his corny joke including the ones behind 
the camera you can’t see, it sort of speaks

for the whole show, OK, the rock star can come on 
to pitch her new cd but not without talking about 
how she overcame depression and drug use, 
and the man selling the book about his mother’s 
Alzheimer’s has to explain how forgetting 

who she was made them closer, since basically 
this is all about helping you, looking in, deal with
whatever life throws at you, as the male co-host 
puts it, turning between guests to his partner
while she nods thoughtfully under her hair, because 

she doesn’t really think of this as a job, she should be 
paying the network, she says, not the other way around, 
though right now they have to go to a commercial 
again, not just one, of course, but ten or fifteen, 
the same old thing of models pretending 

they are amazed housewives or sick husbands 
or doctors in lab coats saying buy this, 
buy that, so you can’t wait to get back 
to some human beings who care about each other 
and about us, and who are who they really are.