(Dan O'Neil front center in sailor cap, Joe Kennedy center back in straw hat)
Joe Kennedy & my grandfather
Are friends in early 1900s Boston
They are two streetcars
Until the tracks form a Y
In the chipped cobblestone
And diverge
Joe sends Dan O'Neil
A postcard from Paris
He says he likes it there
Because when you need it
The cops look the other way
Dan drifts through the city
Summers at the city beaches
Nights out with the boys
He's accepted into the police academy
And soon he's mounted on a horse
Looking regal in a black and white photo
Joe is negotiating deals
In East Coast cities
Charming or intimidating or hoodwinking
His way across time
Dan works 12-hour shifts
Sleeps sporadically
In pest-infested barracks
Pays for his own uniform
Joe meets with players
Of questionable character
In the European capitals
Dan & the other Boston cops strike
Governor Calvin Coolidge
Fires them all permanently
Joe's fascist sympathies stall
His dreams of state power
Dan O'Neil meets Julia d'Oliveira
On the sands in the cool blue
Atlantic sunshine
He is 40 & she is 20
Joe's children ascend in society
But early death & misfortune
Are present always
Dan sells insurance door-to-door
Sees the Red Sox when he can
His ten daughters
A Boston sensation
Are in Life magazine
Joe has affairs with movie stars
Works more deals
In New York Los Angeles D.C. London
The Kennedys appear everywhere
It seems and build
A retreat on Cape Cod
Each of them Joe & Dan
Removes a stone
From the hill of their present
It tumbles and rolls
Ricochets into a multitude
Of other rocks which dislodge
And hit more stones
And I am one now bouncing
Into an infinite present
Lines between me and you
Between now and then
Proliferate shift waver
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