Midterm, and the kids hang round like wisps of summer,
spinning channels between the election and Iraq,
laughing only at ads for the new Hummer

dealership on Silas or Larry Cobalt's Rent-a-Wreck
or the pre-Thanksgiving clear-out at K-Mart.
Even the radio doubts the space between a rock

and a hard place on the war front. It launches in on Marx
which is round about the point where I switch, finally,
to an Anglophile mid-morning with the Kumars

or All Creatures Great And Small or the Royle Family
or any other one of a hundred ways to fritter
a tea-break or two on what's billed, not funnily

enough, as Classic Hour. But not even the future
tense of wheatfields in Ohio or plain-speak in Kansas
can pull us away from a pre-paid, half-hour feature

on William Carlos Williams reading 'Queen Ann's
...