John Gallaher

In a Landscape: XXXVI

What year, what moment was it, when all the television aerials

came down from our roofs?  And now, the skyline

is getting all junked up with dangerous-looking post-apocalyptic

telephone polls that list with hanging wires.  You see them a lot

alongside railroad tracks.  Depending on what song is playing

as we pass, it can begin to look orchestrated, some illustration

of our departure into decay.  Cue the zombies or the apes

and go out abroad into the fields again.  

"The future is a line of trees."  I like saying things like that,

something kind of smoky and getting out around the edges

of whatever one might want to pin it to.  But isn't that, itself,

a good description of the future?  Or the post future, I suppose,

as we got to the future quite a while ago now.  Sometime

in the 60s, I think?  When everything started happening

at the same time . . . only to end up

where all the telephone booths and tape decks ended up.  

My father would take the TV up on the roof with him,

so that he could get the antenna positioned just so.  

He quickly tired of having us help him.  The endless calling out,

"How is it now?" and "Now try Channel 13!" which led invariably

to irritation when he'd come down and try the TV himself.  

So there he was: Birmingham, Alabama, January, 1976,

up on the roof with his beige/gray jacket, the TV balanced

on a pile of blankets in front of him, the aerial

between them, riding the house, his arms up to the sky.