The Sixties--1961 Poem by Sandy Fulton

1961
Year of spacemen: Yuri Gagarin, Alan Shepherd.
The Russkis beat us again,
but all I really wanted was for someone with a poet's soul,
nationality be damned,
to float in the starry void
then come home to tell us about it:
the same old urge
that drove us down from the caves
and made us touch fire.
Yuri, when you died, I wept.

A wild tomcat crawled to my back door that summer,
black as the pall of smog hanging over nearby Los Angeles.
.
Something even more feral than he
had chewed him half to death.
I spoiled him till he healed.
He lapped up milk and tunafish on my back porch.
After his scabs healed in blotches he could have wandered off
but sloped through the cat door into my kitchen,
then pranced about, sniffing and haughty, and decided to stay—
the greatest honor I will ever receive.

I named him Gib, a witch-cat's name.
That was my year for witchcraft.
I tried to summon the devil,
or at least an unimportant minor demon.
My attempts came to nothing.

For one last try I chalked a pentacle
on the bathroom floor,
recited a Latin formula guaranteed to produce results
out of an old book by a Sixteenth Century witch hunter.
I waited. Nobody showed up.
So I threw out the books
and became an agnostic.

Or maybe the bathroom was the wrong room.
Whoever heard of a demon in your bathtub?

I managed to witch myself a naval aviator
who was something of a devil.
One early morn he drove me home,
both of us sho blind drunk
we deshided it was shafer
to wobble hish pink-and-grey '56 Buick
off the shtreet and shlowly down the shidewalk,
ushing pershnickety caution.
It sheemed to make shense at the time.

At year's end the Navy transferred me to Pearl Harbor
to be Administrator for Logistics.
I deposited Gib with Glenn,
which delighted them both.
Not so happy was I, leaving my flyboy.
We took leave, went to a motel, spent a week in bed
then made a farewell at the airfield that outdid Bogart and Bergman.