Pages

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Small revelations need no deathbed

considering how
I watch a considerable number of films
at least one most days
when those days aren’t too demanding
though the films mostly are
confined to my laptop screen
trips out to the theater being savorably rare occasions
it’s not a complete surprise
I might jumble things
now and again or is it then
misgiving an actor’s given name
transposing disposable plot points
but how could I confuse a film’s coloring
and transport its content to a another continent and time
first I should retrace my missteps
worst foot forward back to the trailer I see-saw
hyphens mask bigger blanks than I imagined
I remember paying half my mind to coming attractions
coming too many before a full-priced feature
I’d rarely occasioned out to see
some do come to attract my attention
it began with a pretty girl
they pretty much always do
she waltzed through frames clearly drained to black-and-white
then the same girl still pretty sitting atop a horse-drawn waggon
it put an older period to the piece’s full-stop
hop skip and jump a week
later to a movie reviewed on crisp pages
I hold up against my dog- eared mental note
its flap obscuring all but the letter W
deduction is a wonderfully productive art
agile assumptions can work the nimblest tricks
but my convenient leaps inelegantly escaped a niggling
dissonance to connect this pair of widely ranging narrow dots
a girl and a jagged shape
it’s how I came to mistake Winter's Bone for White Ribbon
months later I’d see the error of my daze gone by
and this stubborn pig of a world with all its pigments restored.

No comments: