Film Noir

from Hotel Lautréamont (1992)

        Just the washing of the floors
	under him was cause for hope.  If there was a flaw
	in something precious, it meant one or more persons
	had been inducted already.  When they heard about it
	it would come to seem as though the rich background
	was you, your space.  It lent you
	a furious dignity that you breezed right through.
	No more apples on the dashboard,
	this is cheating the real thing, earnest
	with life and self-assurance.  And when you died
	they remembered you chiefly.  It was two
	lights on a rowboat, a half-mile off shore
	as the evening breeze drew nigh, cementing relationships.
	And it seemed as though they always heard you, loud you,
	that otherwise nobody remembered except conveniently.
	 
        When the inevitable abrupt change arrived
	I looked to you for reflected confirmation of what
	was happening to me, and unfortunately got it.
	The afternoon windows released their secrets in a flood
	as though no one had ever had any.  In the downpour
	distinct noses and adam’s-apples could be determined
	in a mounting hush of congratulation soon to be
	shattered by a train’s ear-peircing whistle:
	the doors slid shut, there was nothing to do except wait
	for another train, yet this one still stayed on the platform.
	Too bad suicide is discouraged
	in certain modern climates and situations; it makes
	for such a neat ending; nevertheless we will brush on,
	clinging to separate ideas as though they made a pattern.
	And all shall be insulted
	at the end where the going gets sticky
	beyond any apology, beyond dried beans and casual sex, beyond even
	the neighbor’s girl in a schoolyard, half a century ago
	when things still seemed pretty modern
	and underlying motives were the same
	though not the dark, intricate working out of them.
	 
        Say we just landed, like strangers in a hole:
	what manner of manners is to be cut out of us, what sails
	trimmed for the descent
	into the matter of the sun.
	Are Americans sexier, she breathed, or what is it
	that gives their nudes a subliminal variation
	on this often rehearsed enterprise, until we can see
	into it, arranging differences?  And that moan
	you heard was just idle gossip, someone running around
	to instruct the clerks of our compassion
	in rules, rhetoric or some other tell-tale destiny
	if we are about to get it right again.
	 
        But on the curb of the residential street
	where wind thrives and the locals
	shrug off any connection to the scenery, back where it was bad,
	the same dichotomy obtains.  We and they.
	It’s not much more simple than that.
	And as I approach the master switch
	for instructions, there are little smiles of recognition
	everywhere, in the curdled clouds, on the reluctant shore,
	to tell us it’s safe to go home.
	 
        I hope they can come.
	They can sleep under my bed.