Before you deplane, the eternal questions
Recur: “Is your tie cinched and your fly zipped?”
Once in Moscow an assistant winced
And you got it. You were, after all, brilliant;
Statesmen, editors, and starlets
Agreed. If there were dissenters, a joke
Told at your expense that made a joke
Of them sufficed. Who were they to question
Someone who’d trafficked with starlets,
The shade of Bismarck, and numerous unzipped
Eminences? “It’s lights that are brilliant,
Henry, not people,” a prof once counseled. You winced
And when more bombs fell, Harvard winced.
The shrieks of the dead offered no jokes.
Pain’s televised pulse was brilliant
As hellfire; the hard, dismal questions
Left cleverness spewing the colloquial zip.
A relief then to scan headlines on starlets:
“Henry the K Cozies Up with Starlet!”
Tabloid glitz that made Foggy Bottom wince—
Jealous dipsomat twerps. You zipped
It up and returned to the Borscht Belt jokes
You told Anwar and Golda, the dumb questions
You asked Nixon whose answers were brilliant
Or so you assured him. You were loyal—as brilliant
A ploy as the slyest, bed-hopping starlet
Ever devised. When he called in the night with questions
About himself, you felt the darkness in your room wince:
Who could tell where ambition ended and a joke
Began whose quiet, ghastly ironies zipped
Past the news magazines, pundits, and zip-
Headed hipsters and into the perfidy of brilliance?
Alas, the president was an unsteady joke
And no amount of football, beer, and starlets
Could keep those in the printed know from wincing:
Noisy democracy must have its questions.
If shuttles meant zip to a pouting starlet
Stroking your brilliance, at least she didn’t wince
At your jowly jokes. And she undid all questions.
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