The Movies


Persistence of vision

Action sliced so thin it freezes
into a single frame, a picture
in a Zoetrope.  Revolving drum,
a slit, a source of light
and the stopped motion re-starts.
The eye reassembles tiny increments
into continuous flow.

A parlour curiosity, Victorian novelty,
those flickering dreams.  And yet
the turning drum created 
a kind of heat.  Hold a strip
of newly invented celluloid nearby
and it bursts into light  
around the world, horses dash
across screens as wide as walls.
The feverish crank of cameras,
reels flying through the projector's
thin, bright 'now'.  Cowboys,
Cupid's bows and swashbucklers
are animated, twenty-eight frames
per second, the heated friction
of narrative, its persistent visions.


Oh, Rose Marie, I love you

She loved the love stories.  
The talkies then so new, younger 
than her own young life,
sound printed as a barred scrim 
beside the sprocket holes 
along a strip of images,
meshing cleverly with movement
as Nelson Eddy belted out the long, strong notes
of Rose Marie like a conveyor belt.
Sound drenching landscape 
as if it were quite reasonable to fill
Canadian forests with a full-blown orchestra.

Her birthday treat—taken to the pictures
in the afternoon.  Rialto Cinema 
on College Street, the new film
Maytime.  Her grandfather paid down
sixpences for tickets
and they entered the flicker of story
half-way through.  Jeannette MacDonald 
as the ball's belle, Nelson Eddy waltzing her
around spring-time's ribboned pole.
May enchanted.

They watched until the end, and then
until the point where they came in.
That's it, May,  said her granddad.
We've seen it all.   But she pleaded
to see that scene again, and then another
until her patient grandfather
got cross and said, I'm going now.
You'd better come along.   
But she sat there alone
in the palace of repeatable dreams.
Watched to the end
then round again.

For once, the princess had refused
to leave at midnight. 
She waltzed home at last, in thrall
to her Presbyterian stepmother's scolds.
But did not care.  Her feet were on petals.
She had been to the ball.


Maytime

We bring back Maytime, my mother and I,
iridescent 
on a DVD's whirling circle.
In the present,
the past lifts from its static, stuttered pattern
of pits in plastic,
the way time's phase transition melts the solid, 
inelastic, 
into flow with the ruby laser-tip of 'now'.

We watch, content,
the end.  The old lady slipping into sleep below
the tanglement
of blossom-laden branches.  The young lover's ghost
bending down,
reaching out transparent hands to her.
Music blown
around them like returning swallows—Sweetheart,
sweetheart, sweetheart,
will you love me always?  And her young self rises
to step apart
from that old, discarded body.  She takes his hand,
unhesitating
ghost.  A different phase transition—the solid
sublimating
straight to air, something that inhabits neither
solid nor stream,
but time itself—its pattern of pits and lands.

We turn the machine
off.  The notes and images have re-condensed
on the silver skin
of the DVD, like a film of quick mercury
coating glass.
I click the disk safely inside the hard fact
of its cover, pass
it to my mother.  She takes it, tucks it
in, at random
on the rack below my father's picture.

His sad phantom
still walks a dementia ward nearby,
the lost glow
of shared lives fading from his pitted mind.

Still, we know
that we can watch this tale at least, whenever
we want its hands
held out to us, its springs, its silvered pasts, 
its happy ends,

its promised ghosts.