Listening to TV at the fitness center...

Morning in America What draws you to them at first is the nicknames they have for each other and their little jokes, like the remark the woman makes to her co-host about his tie, then apologizes and even touches it so she seems to more than like him, and why not, he's handsome in a regular-guy, unthreatening sort of way, and when they all come back from a commercial, you almost wonder whether the blonde who does the news might be a little jealous, given how she keeps it up about the tie, or maybe you think just for an instant, how is it possible for him to watch her all dressed up in her serious costume to read the news each morning and not sometimes think of her "in that way," but when you happen to catch it the next morning, she brings in pictures of her baby, and you say wait a minute, she has a whole other life off the set, this is a job and these people are professionals, the newswoman herself, for openers, reading right through the bad news about all the shoppers who blew up in the open market in Iraq and the shocking statistics about obesity in the United States, unable no matter how hard she tries to avoid a touch of sadness on her face, as if what can she do besides continue to be thin and appealing herself, which is when you really appreciate the fat laughing guy who does the weather because you can be serious for just so long, and anyway there's always a silver lining in every dark cloud, like he says, for instance the ones hovering right here over the Midwest, gesturing toward the cloud graphic spinning into place, and even though everybody groans over his corny joke including the ones behind the camera you can't see, it sort of speaks for the whole show, OK, the rock star can come on to pitch her new CD but not without talking about how she overcame depression and drug use, and the man selling the book about his mother's Alzheimer's has to explain how forgetting who she was made them closer, since basically this is all about helping you, looking in, deal with whatever life throws at you, as the male co-host puts it, turning between guests to his partner while she nods thoughtfully under her hair, because she doesn't really think of this as a job, she should be paying the network, she says, not the other way around, though right now they have to go to a commercial again not just one, of course, but ten or fifteen, the same old thing of models pretending they are amazed housewives or sick husbands or doctors in lab coats saying buy this, buy that, so you can't wait to get back to some human beings who care about each other and about us, and who are who they really are. --Wesley McNair, from Lovers of the Lost: New and Selected Poems. © David R. Godine, 2010.