Prime Time Television Viewing, Commercial Airlines Disaster Still Life, Albany. NY, 1972
alan catlin
Inside, they are watching prime time TV,
Archie Bunker laugh lines extending the skin
that tightens the night inside their eyes.
Overhead, outside, a commercial airplane pilot
considers all the last minute landing spaces
before the Albany County runway, rejects as too
dangerous, the open State University campus fields,
bellies in low over the tree line, landing gears
down, looking for something four lanes wide, anything
at all. The Brevator street cars turn their
high beams down when they hear it hit, one block
west, plowing down trees, altering walls, gouging
valleys into the earth. After contact, in the
backyard, before the ambulances, before the sirens,
a cordless radio knocked loose at impact recites
the News and the Weather to the swing set, the
climbing vines and broken tomato stakes. Later,
at St. Peter's, the double rows of DOA's lie
in a hallway for hours covered by white sheets,
the janitors scrub thereafter with ammonia and bleach,
the scent never leaving their noses or their eyes
as they look up from their work thinking of how
it must have felt, turning, the second after death
hit the living room picture window and flew inside.
