February 3, 1959 by Christopher Pellizzari

A great crash in the cornfield...
then silence again.
Corn, snow, soil, sky
shifting back to quiet,
like an old man returning to his sofa,
which has absorbed his shape,
after changing the radio channel by hand.

Corn stalks like weather vanes,
pointing in all directions,
to the hysteria of snowflakes
swarming the sky like flies,
the sky itself something dead.

The shivering pale sun arrives on scene
to identify what remains of the young men,
like some grieving mother,
a mother for all four mothers,
as men in cars approach cautiously
from a distance.

Buddy Holly’s glasses are in the snow.
They are unaccustomed to snow.
They remember the arid high plains of Lubbock,
the dust bowl sand storms against
the boy’s window,
the whistling of something never heard before
in neon orbits still in the Western sky,
far from this frozen place.

The glasses are picked up by a boy in Liverpool,
who tries them on when he writes his first song,
in his comfortable bedroom on Menlove Avenue,
far from this frozen place.



Christopher Pellizzari was born in Gary, Indiana. He didn’t start publishing his poetry until 2019. He is Lithuanian-American, the son of an immigrant mother.