Poem with a Car Wreck
Me and my beloved at a Kieslowski
retrospective he hopes I’ll find
my passion for cinema me too
the way I find my soup ladle rocking
behind the stove I will dip my heart
into this French-speaking blue film
and come out ready to eat
but of course I’m ashamed what I
really hope for is the brisk and the blunt
like Nosferatu my favorite part
being the opening standing corpses
their mouths hanging
with a dire chorus I like film openings
Saving Private Ryan’s
splash splash agony title
but tonight I get something else
flashing yellow lights a tunnel
we are riding in a Mercedes
with a bored little girl not for very long
fog and daylight a tree and a crash
the husband little girl don’t make it
the lady tries to kill herself
then she writes music
in between she swims sees her mother
who can’t quite remember her
I ought to like it
no intrigue no plot nothing to not get
I don’t know ponderous metonymy
come out and say it man
the baby mice she’s scared of
signal her little girl the whore downstairs
mirrors the mistress she didn’t know about
her asking the whore to kill the mice well
I get it I’m not madame subtle but I get it
no I’d really rather this movie talk about
our new low-sodium diet Jesus
we’re going to die the deaths of our parents
my parents! The first generation of Lins
to kick it in hospitals instead of home
to say I love you before wheeling into O.R. I mean
who is more honest than a woman
on an operating table the breeze twirling
through her ribs and knocking heart
her flesh already stinking that sweet-vomit
anesthesia the rest of us not knowing
squat if I were in that movie
I’d be the boy who sees the car first
who snatches the gold cross off the lady
while her husband and child die next to her
that was the smartest thing
you’ll ever do kiddo trust me
