It was the last gasp of a decade of 
doings stumbling and careening into 
one another like a troupe of spaced-out 
acrobats.  Charisma bred public 
homicides, stacked up celebrated corpses.  
War ran its fatal course and politics, 
once a promising pail of fresh milk, soured.  
Renaissance Rock began its decadence,
hardening to Mannerist glam-disco-punk.  
Aquarian rebels climbed to pinnacles 
of silliness, sanguine naïfs woke each 
morning as if it were their first, certain
they could correct human nature as easily
as any botched first draft.  Their blind hopes and 
intrigues, the passions and high trills of their 
first three acts, settled to a spent finale, 
something like the end of Figaro minus 
the joy and pyrotechnics.  Latchkey kids 
endured wearying, unsettling weekends with 
estranged dads, dull weekdays with a depressed 
mom downstairs.  A retrospective sonogram 
might shadow forth a fetus, the curled-up 
future sustained on blood obliviously 
given, unconsciously received, about 
to shudder down a new decade’s canal 
into the glare of an unsure future,  
one not without aspiration, promise. 
 
On March 5, 1953, Sergei Prokofiev 
and Josef Stalin died.  Coincidences 
come in pairs.  On November 22, 1963, 
JFK and Aldous Huxley died. That’s 
the day the Sixties began.  The decade 
closed a decade later in a flare of 
novelty and undoing.  But since we’re 
all in thrall to the decimal system
and like nicknames, we call them the Sixties. 

It was the year the U.S. pulled its troops 
out of Vietnam and the APA 
deleted homosexuality from 
its Diagnostic and Statistical 
Manual of Mental Disorders,  
when the draft ended with the suddenly 
quaint democratic ideal of the 
citizen-soldier.  Universities 
ran out of baby boomers, draft evaders, 
and tenure slots.  Nixon cut off funds for 
public housing, razed Bretton Woods, dismantled 
the stable cross of gold.  The year brought the Yom 
Kippur War, the Arab Oil Embargo—
all igniting the inflating of inflation. 
It was the year when the economy 
began turning palpably post-industrial,   
computers superseding Bessemer 
converters.  Above all, it was the year
when women rose up, a century 
after their foremothers turned from freeing the 
enslaved to emancipating themselves.  Women’s 
Libbers burned bras and lifted consciousness, 
Roe beat Wade, and the NPR matriarchs 
outreported the well-paid network men
on SCOTUS, Watergate, and Title Nine,  
when mothers put their daughters on The Pill, 
praying they wouldn’t take any others.  
Now the war was over, it was the divorce 
rate that began its decade’s escalation.  
Annus mirabilis. 

It’s our habit to divide time
and space, then from now, there from here.
We hanker to fix what happens
acre by acre, year by year.

In mêlées it’s hard to say
who’s losing or who’s winning.
Turning-points are tough to spot
while the dancer’s spinning.