The Last Predicta TV
Martians, for instance, in their metal frisbee
might appear from these immaculate
chrome borders themselves
spit-shined like Art Deco
mirrors. Pyramus and Thisbe
for the increasingly illiterate,
packed in shotgun houses like shelves,
1959 and ‘60 carried their cargo
of cardboard oracles and relevant trivia:
the Philco Model H341
had a sixteen-inch screen
swiveling on a smug, Chevy-like
chassis while the sports trivium—
baseball, football, baseball—won
over even wives and sugary teens
hungry as they were for barlight,
green men, no-hitters: in short,
anything that shines,
anything that makes lives
seem easy, seamless, slow to burn.
Picture my father—the sort
that buys a car and keeps it, whines
over nothing save his lawn and neck ties—
only eighteen when the last wheel turned
on the Predicta assembly.
He’s looking into the future
of TV, a future continually there
an hour before he arrives
[stanza break]
with popcorn, soft drink, and me,
or some version of me, in the aperture.
We’re like a seam that wants to tear,
he and I, that Predicta, and the lives
blooming there in technicolor.
For each new generation a new genus
and the genius who named it,
who foretold the danger
the widely cultivated horror
of solid state circuitry would be to us
who lived by the conduit,
cast in the die of the predictable stranger.
from
Virginia Quarterly Review.