The Return of Richard Nixon

by Brett Rutherford

Confront them. Wing them away
in a one-way helicopter.

Damn it if they don’t come back
like termites or carpenter ants!

After a “decent interval”
the scoundrel Nixon came back.

He was on the best-seller list,
dashing about the talk shows,
a flutter of paper wings

on a rumpled dark suit.

He mingled among diplomats,
pressed hands of potentates,
showed teeth
behind the wrinkled dough
of a smile,

his head-on gaze at the cameras
said, “You see, I am not crazy.
I could have pushed that button.
But I didn’t.”
He fund-raised for candidates.
He stood in the reception line
and people told their children
as though they had met a Borgia,
some Pharaoh of Egypt,
or the dreaded Torquemada,
and lived to tell the tale.

The mirror
made no mistake.
The only reflection he had,
like an old cloth coat,
told him that skin was hard,
stayed where it was pulled,
that blood coagulated,
vision receded, friends
said they would call
but did not. He heard,
when he walked the golf course,
the mocking caddies parroting
“Not a crook. Not a crook.
Not a crook.”

Still, there was talk,
when he rose each day
and put on the requisite tie
and the American-flag pin.
Some said he wasn’t too old to serve.

The ink of the pardon was dry.
People just don’t remember.
They liked him in China.

I shuddered each time
I saw his face on the news,
and I called out in anger:
America,

don’t give a snake

a leg to stand on.