Got to see William Shatner recently at SiliCon, and he was a poem.
Willam Shatner at Ninety
SiliCon, 2021
He’s still got it.
Most of it, anyway.
Enough to draw long lines of excited adults
to a vast blue room in a convention center
in downtown San Jose at the end of August.
So what if he can’t remember this word
or that and has to ask his fans for help,
standing on the edge of the stage in a
light blue Hawaiian shirt, the fabric fighting
to rein his stomach in, his face red and wrinkled
and shiny from the heat of the spotlight,
but his eyes wide and bright as he holds forth
on historic techniques for making concrete
or the discovery of the trenches at the bottom
of the ocean, his mind still going where no man
has gone, or doesn’t go often enough, in his opinion,
and that’s why he just started a podcast.
“What’s that, that round building in Rome?
he asks and “What do you call them, the gaps
at the bottom of the ocean?” His fans, the father
from Berkeley, the gray-haired man in the Kirk shirt,
the woman declaring her mother’s love for him,
they shout the answers back, leaning forward
in their seats to fill in his blanks.
