HAIL TO THE CHIEF

October 06, 2025 / John Grimmett

My father taught me
the names of the Presidents
on a deck of playing cards
of Presidential Portraits:

at five,
I knew
Washington to Bush,
each name a silver coin
polished by paper repetition.
I memorized them obediently,
their order, their wars,
their imperfections,
their drunkenness,
their solitude,
their solemnity,
their marble faces
staring forward,
unwavering monuments.

Can a man be a monument?

Even as a boy
I sensed how power
turns to stone in the mouth.
Jefferson wrote of liberty
while counting lives in his ledger;
Jackson smiled
through the smoke of villages.
Reagan watched the flames
of gay men
extinguish from an epidemic.

I use to carry their names
like stones in my pocket,
heavy, impossible to skip.

Now,
I take them
at the edge of a river
and step into the current barefoot,
letting the water rewrite history
without title or transfer.

Off goes Lincoln,
then Truman,
then Kennedy…
I choose to live by smaller laws:
the bend of light through a leaf,
the sound of my own heart
when I refuse to pledge Allegiance.

Off goes Coolidge,
Off goes FDR,
Off goes Ike…

(I had forgotten about Hayes
but off he goes, too,
into bubbling rivers of time
and obscurity.)

Lighter now,
I think of my father
with his index cards,
my pockets empty
yet full of an invisibility,
a hope:

I am grateful
I learned from that deck —
from an unrelenting father —
that freedom is not in the order of names
but in the blessed disorder.

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