Kim Roberts (photo, Art Omi, Oct 2019)
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Double Indemnity
No, not insurance. What I
meant to say was “double identity,”
as in Boutros Boutros-Ghali,
William Carlos Williams, Sirhan Sirhan,
Lady Gaga. For these folks, surely,
The Postman Always Rings Twice.
But now I’ve Mildred Pierced myself
to the image of James M. Cain,
typing away in his little white house
in suburban Maryland. His typewriter
is preserved in a university library;
I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the change
from manual to electric to electronic
to what-the-hell-is-a-typewriter
and no one will be archiving
our battered beloved iPads,
even if they once belonged to Yo-Yo Ma,
Flavor Flav, or Marky Mark.
Now all our devices must do at least
two things: phone-cameras,
calculator-umbrellas. But in truth
all of us lead double lives, an outer
story plus a hidden story, separated by
such a thin skin. Tell us that one again
Ford Madox Ford, Kris Kristofferson,
Humbert Humbert, Richie Rich.
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Kim Roberts is the editor of By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of our Nation’s Capital (University of Virginia Press, 2020) and the author of A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston (University of Virginia Press, 2018). She has published five books of poems, most recently The Scientific Method (WordTech Editions, 2017).
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