The Barber's Chair

Kevin DOBBS has published poems in many journals, including: Carolina Quarterly, Poet Lore, Madison Review, New Delta Review, Maverick Magazine, Sou'wester, Soundings East, Writer's Forum, among others. Currently, Mr. Dobbs is an associate professor of English at the International University of Health and Welfare in Japan. With his wife, the writer and artist Zheng Tan Yi, and their daughter, Asia, Mr. Dobbs resides in the Nasu region of Japan, surrounded by the Japanese Alps and hundreds of hotsprings.

THE BARBER'S CHAIR

Like the electric chair makes
you remember your whole life.

The barber snaps a white towel
and turns it around your neck:

You think back thirty-eight-years
to another you, now dead really-

a blood-soaked bundle
as you lay under the Mercury

bumper, thighbone turned up
like a bullhorn. The same year,

1963, another car,
a Lincoln convertible, had

magic seats too. When you first saw
the Zapruder film decades later

you had unmistakable deja vu:
Dallas, where blood was as silver

as scissors, sweet stud shimmering
long before the lunar floor. You

were in that glare. Not spectator.
But in that Lincoln's back seat.

Now, you smell his cologne and swear
as electric shears buzz your temples:

One small blast through the head of Man.
You can even hear the sudden thuds,

the lead shafts goring out the light,
as the barber swivels the chair

to the mirror and says, "Should I
take more gray?" It's then you see

the bloody, crumpled down dashboard
over which your sexy young mother

is buckled in horror, the father
you thought would always be president,

on the hood, hands and knees, swaying,
head somehow sown into the wrinkled

windshield. The barber says "Sorry."
--There's blood on the towel.

Says his shears have slit your ear.
The barber's chair, like the electric

chair, sends you everywhere at once.
You were in Dallas that day.

Not gawking from the sidewalk, not
just walking by, pulling triggers

or even taking snapshots. No,
the whole family was packed

into that big, beautiful Lincoln
moving so slow, and then so fast.

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