You might come here now
to go birding and, wandering through the
undergrowth, run
across the ticket booth smothered in briars.
Speaker posts lean out of the woods like rusty
saplings,
you pause for your bearings.
Somewhere off in the thicket was the popcorn stand
where two dollars took you
through a double feature-Sunset Boulevard,
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
The place was already seedy
and running down, and who wouldn’t wince
at the lives started here on a passion thin as film?
A whistle, and a yellow-throat springs to a branch.
Your hand gropes the camera.
That blue Thunderbird,
the ’68 with the jacked-up shocks? That was you
then.
What junkyard is it rusting into?
And this is you now, middle age and beyond.
Those hot screen kisses that steamed up windows,
that rocked backseats,
gone now in the smoke of a blown projector.
And Gloria Swanson, Bette Davis,
all those others
we dreamed to be like? Hermited
in some mansion, plotting withered comebacks?
(You fumble the f-stop, the empty branch sways.)
Or gone into briars, pine needles, air?
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