By Mary Jo Salter

The music was already turning sad,

      those fresh-faced voices singing in a round

            the lie that time could set its needle back

and play from the beginning. Had you lived

      to eighty, as you’d wished, who knows?—you might

            have broken from the circle of that past

more ours than yours. Never even sure

      which was the truest color for your hair

            (it changed with each photographer), we claimed

you for ourselves; called you John and named

      the day you left us (spun out like a reel—

            the last broadcast to prove you’d lived at all)

an end to hope itself. It isn’t true,

      and worse, does you no justice if we call

            your death the death of anything but you.

II

It put you in the headlines once again:

      years after you’d left the band, you joined

            another—of those whose lives, in breaking, link

all memory with their end. The studio

      of history can tamper with you now,

            as if there’d always been a single track

chance traveled on, and your discordant voice

      had led us to the final violence.

            Yet like the times when I, a star-crossed fan,

had catalogued your favorite foods, your views

      on monarchy and war, and gaily clipped

            your quips and daily antics from the news,

I keep a loving record of your death.

      All the evidence is in—of what,

            and to what end, it’s hard to figure out,

riddles you might have beat into a song.

      A younger face of yours, a cover shot,

            peered from all the newsstands as if proof

of some noteworthy thing you’d newly done.

• Arts & Sciences
• Living

Poet Bio

Mary Jo Salter was one of the prominent poets of the New Formalist movement, which revived traditional technique in a modern voice during the eighties. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Salter has spent much time traveling and living abroad, which is evident in such collections as Henry Purcell in Japan. See More By This Poet

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