My Zoom Graduation

by Stephen Paul Miller

         delivered to our graduating English majors, May 20, 2020

Keeping vigil with one who has left   
Never again responding   
Not recognizing the time of death  
One’s face in starlight.   
    What’s a poem? A bunch of words creating feedback and taking off on  
    it not slowing on the curves then climbing overtones in the valley’s mist  
    graduating for now looking down on your global lit class where astral  
    cams zoom and make you think hmmm you are the stars in the night.  
    In our hole settling down preparing you you you for who who who  
    knows if you can make it anywhere you’ll do it in New York with no  
    one there a virus and a flu too tired to infect anyone fall asleep in each  
    other’s arms—don’t begrudge them, crane up your social distance—  

the camera is the star  

in a Busby Berkeley flying rug—Berkeley, friends call him Buzz, a  
    mind-altering Hollywood choreographer who in Gold Diggers of 1935  
    at last directed even non-dance parts in synchronized story rhythm, is  
    recording multitudes flowing up in budding phantasmagoric Keynesian  
    lenses through which the first macroeconomy looks down from over  
    sixty feet in the air—Buzz puts holes in every WB ceiling—and for the  
    last few years you’ve been looking down and still are but now you’re in  
    it—  
                                                in everything for the first time—  
                                                                      the dancer and the Busby one.  

His films bring on superheroes—in ‘38 Superman creator Jerry Siegel  
appropriates “Lois Lane” from Lola Lane—star of Busby’s ‘38 Hollywood  
     Hotel  and Jimmy Cagney’s torn Footlight Parade producer/hoofer character’s  
    “Kent.”  

As if from the mythic heights of your English class Busby is filming the  
    ethereal “Shadow Waltz” of Gold Diggers of 1933—Please see https://www.youtube.com/watch
v=TAH0IKUk3aE:  
everyone on high spiraling wooden ribbons, dancing in and out of hang- 
    ing mirrored floors becoming one and many neon violin(s), with one  
    and many neon bow(s) pulsing your kaleidoscopic eye where Buzz sails  
    his trapeze through citizens as music/music as citizens  
             swirling below and in his floating camera boom perch  

        when much like the current pandemic  
the massive 6.4 Long Beach earthquake rocks LA knocking out power  
    throwing Busby off his flying dance directing boat thirty feet above us.  
    Hanging by a hand, his cinematographer pulls him up.  
    Sensing dancers in the dark falling off flight upon flight of narrow rising  
    runways, Buzz shouts  

“No one move till someone opens a door and lets in some light!!!”  

            That’s the president we need that’s you.  

Stephen Paul Miller is preparing his next book of poems, Beautiful Snacks (Marsh Hawk Press). He’s a Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York, where he live on East 8^th Street. His ten books include The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Duke University Press), There’s Only One God and You’re Not It (Marsh Hawk) and Being with a Bullet (Talisman). Venues where he’s been published include Best American Poetry, Publisher’s Weekly, Salon, Barrow Street, New American Writing, Posit, and the New York Daily News. Ralph Almeida is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and creates in Brooklyn, NY.