by Donna Masini
4:30
MOVIE
POEMS
Donna Masini
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In memory of my sister
Karen Weinstein
;
for my brother
David Masini
Contents
(Deleted Scene: Worry)
;
The Lights Go Down at the Angelika
Waiting Room
Mind Screen
Pronoun Problem
Tracking Shot: Subway (Interior)
Watching the Six-Part Pride and Prejudice, Mid-Chemo, with My Sister
What Didn’t Work
The Extra
A Fable
Anxieties
Hell
(Deleted Scene: Diagnosis)
The Port
Movie
Storylines
“Gone Girl”
;
Water Lilies
;
(Deleted Scene: Bargaining)
Woman on Cell Phone Dragging an Empty Cart Through Washington Square Park
Point-of-View Shot: Celeriac
Trying to Understand Irony
My Child
Tracking Shot: Subway Lines
The Blob
Split Screen
Migraine
(Deleted Scene: Last Day)
Revolve
Scary Movie
Washing Her Hair
A Gate
(Deleted Scene: Last Day)
Elegy for a Church-Key
Trailer
Marginalia
;
Bird-Watching
;
Notes
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Deleted Scene: Worry (.14)
(Living Room: Interior)
All these years, my sister says,
worrying something would happen.
And now it has.
;
The Lights Go Down at the Angelika
and you press into the dark, imagine
the stranger two rows back, that fragile
chance you’ll forget in the second trailer.
Now it’s quiet, still
this burden of being watcher and screen
and what floats across it—light pouring out
its time and necklines and train wrecks.
What a relief to yield to the EXIT
sign red “I” blinking like a candle.
Soon the enormous figures moving
across rooms, the emphatic narrative
arcs. (There’s the thrum of the subway,
its engine of extras.) Here now
the beginning of trivia tests. Warning puppets
with brown-bag faces and fringy hair.
You’re almost here. But what you want
is the after. How yourself you are now
walking into the night, full moon over Houston Street,
at the bright fruit stand touching the yellow
mums. Here you are: Woman With Cilantro
listening to the rattle of the wrap,
the paper sound paper makes after you
have heard movie paper. Apples are more apples.
Paper more paper. Cilantro, its sweaty green self.
Waiting Room
My sister’s inside in a green gown
and I’m here twisting dread into origami
tissues, riot mind ticking wrong wrong.
Is this what’s been waiting
all along? All of us carried off on a train,
pressed to a window, charting the crazy migration
of cells, disaster oaring
steadily after us like Magi
to the babe. And time, grim monitor,
screening each of us in our green toga.
One day you’re drinking your first martini,
a minute later you’re roaming
some hospital wing. (Why call it a wing?
Why say origami when it’s a useless rag?)
Now none of it matters. My iron
will, impeccable timing.
I think of a far-off war-torn town
hiding my sister in her twin gown.
Mind Screen
It’s a kind of crime scene,
as if the mind were a dime
novel, a scrim of need and semen,
all cinder and siren, a dim
prison where the miser dines
on rinds of desire, and the sinner,
sincere as denim, repeats Eden’s
demise—that luckless toss of dice.
Yet here at the rim of this demesne
a mitigating mise-en-scène:
a close-up of her mother stirring rice,
a glass of sparkling cider, a mince
pie spliced in— not to rescind or mend:
what mind denies mercies mine in the end.
Pronoun Problem
Watch yourself, your mother
used to say. Watch
what you’re doing. Watch
your mouth. There you are:
a girl with pink chewing gum.
You’re three. There’s the fire escape.
Your sister is being born.
Your uncle is keeping an eye on you.
Watch the way you talk
to yourself. Your nothing
is never as good as her nothing.
Whoever she is.
Tracking Shot: Subway (Interior)
Bad things tend to happen quickly
the doctor said last week, meaning to comfort.
So many shopping bags. Paper or plastic, the weary cashiers ask.
People who bought this also bought . . .
Particles like Grape-Nuts rain over Paris.
The long ramble into __________. And the tests that come
every night. Sometimes the test’s called Where’s My Bag? Sometimes
Find the Hidden __________. So many forms. In case of emergency
. . . date of last . . . Frame the question. Make a scene.
A story is like an eye chart. Better this way or [lens flips] this way.
This way or [lens flips]
Watching the Six-Part Pride and Prejudice, Mid-Chemo, with My Sister
We start stopping when she’s afraid
something bad will happen. Don’t worry,
I say, all will be well.
How could she know? She’s never
read it, never heard of Elizabeth
and Jane, never wanted Mr. Darcy. Like me
she needs to know how things will end.
I know Elizabeth will be fine. As I knew,
last week, my sister weeping, that Elinor—
sobbing, begging—wouldn’t lose Marianne.
It’s Jane Austen! My sister doesn’t know that
in Austen nothing really bad happens. I leave her
on the couch with the last hours.
How much my sister will have to endure,
alone, with this new drama.
Later her message. The last one
in which she will sound like herself.
Hi, it’s me. The movie was unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
What Didn’t Work
ChemoTarcevaprayer
meditationaffirmationXanax
AvastinNebulizerZofran
ZoloftVicodinnotebooks
nursesoxygen tankpastina
magical thinkingPET scansmovies
therapyphone callscandles
acceptancedenialmeatloaf
doctorsrosary beadssleep
Irish soda breadinternetincantations
visitorssesame oilpain patches
CAT scansmassageshopping
thin sliced Italian bread with melted mozzarella
St. Anthony oilLourdes waterSt. Peregrine
teaspring waterget well cards
relaxation tapesreclinercooking shows
cotton T-shirtslawn furniturea new baby
giving up Parisgiving up Miamicharts
bargainingnot bargainingconnections
counting with herbreathing for herwill
Pride and PrejudiceDownton Abbeyprayer
watching TVnot watching TVprayer
prayerprayerprayer
lists
The Extra
Once again she’s reading about impermanence, pencil in hand, starring
the parts she’s marked before.
Her script asks her to think of a wave: seen one way it seems to
have distinct identity, in another, it’s just the behavior of water. She
underlines this.
Empty of identity but full of water, her script says, temporarily possible
. . . a set of constantly changing behaviors. She underlines this, too.
Sometimes she reads a headline and feels like she’s in a car with a
crazed erratic driver—feet braced against the dashboard. (The Krebs
cycle cycling inside her, but she can’t remember what it does.)
She likes the phrase “interior silence” but thinks she’s only experienced
this while sick in bed with a fever.
Now she’s practicing seeing death everywhere—on the subway: each
corpse looking into a cell phone screen. Some corpses are wearing
expensive boots. Watches.
Her script says it is absolutely certain we are to die, and that she is
supposed to believe this.
Rehearsing a commercial for SoulCycle she is trying to see people as
waves. Grief comes in waves. And light. And the rolling dust-motes in her
childhood bedroom. And roll.
She and her sister wanted waves. They pinned rollers to their heads, stiff
bristles like artificial Christmas trees, digging into their scalps as they
slept. Their hair was straight, limp as prayer book pages. Waves didn’t
last. Their mother decided to give them permanents.
Still pedaling the stationary bicycle she can’t stop thinking about the
village that fell asleep for one hundred years and everything—the broom
mid-sweep! water pouring from the pitcher!—stayed the same.
So many people creeping around inside what they label her “petite
ethnic-type” self on the back of her headshot.
The torture reports . . . cops shooting the unarmed . . .How to pick out
the one displaced face that lets her imagine millions. What is her role?
Every wave related to every other wave, her script says. She’s rarely been
in a close-up. Mostly pans, tracking shots.
Here they’ve marked her place by a pond, her brother saying this won’t
end well. Her backstory sister teaching her to deadhead the roses.
When she has no list of things to do, she is listless.
We die alone but we go to the movies together, she writes in her journal.
Bye-bye! her mother waves in the 8mm home movie. Wave goodbye girls.
And cut.
A jazzy labyrinth from labia to grave, she writes.
There it is: childhood gone. That Old Brooklyn with its clotheslines and
yellow fallout shelter signs. (Rice Krispies snap crackle and popping in
the turquoise plastic bowls.)
Hers is a small part and she knows no one’s watching, still she is sincere
and carries her intention. She thinks of this at the protest march with
her red-markered RESIST rag pinned to her coat collar.
She rearranges the letters on a movie poster in the oncologist’s office and
finds St. Anthony. She thinks this means everything will be ok.
She thinks what’s the difference between prayer and worry?
Even when she watches a movie she imagines herself as one of the
faceless victims falling into a clump of leaves . . . In a crowd of refugees
creeping along the edges of the screen.
Secretly she thinks of certain Chinese films in which what is really
important appears at the edge.
She has never gotten past a wave in any ocean. Once she was knocked
unconscious by the behavior of water.
She knows her most important moments will be in deleted scenes.
A Fable
Driving into the heart of night we arrive at the part
of the movie where I start tap-dancing, tap-tapping
across a tin sheet, a sort of surfing airborne pan
listing side to side, and me, tilting to
balance, announcing I am Esther Williams.
All is blue, salty with prayer and incantation,
all dazzling aristocratic hands. But it wasn’t the heart
of night. There was no heart. It was true
about the tilting, but the movie not a movie at all,
just the usual drivel and sludge, and never having seen
Esther Williams, in truth I’d only conjured
a wet black forties one-piece and rubber bathing cap.
Oh what’s the use. It’s grief’s freeze-frame churchyard
with its fresh cut dirge, its pretend heaven. Watch me
driving myself down this winding country road, top down,
one hand on the wheel, the other grabbing back my thick blond hair
like some Monica Vitti whose leopard kerchief the wind sucked off
long ago. Hours? Decades? Now, wanting a bit of chachacha,
she flips the radio dial loosing a grassy static,
a spasmodic numbing hive-buzz of stumbling bees.
She flips it off. She’ll be drifting in that static soon enough
with her ballet flats and tin rigor mortis. Allora! In bocca al lupo
cries a child’s nightlight, while night releases its indifferent stars.
Anxieties
It’s like ants
and more ants.
West, east
their little axes
hack and tease.
Your sins. Your back taxes.
This is your Etna,
your senate
of dread, at the axis
of reason, your taxi
to hell. You see
your past tense—
and next? a nest
of jittery ties.
You’re ill at ease,
at sea,
almost in-
sane. You’ve eaten
your saints.
You pray to your sins.
Even sex
is no exit.
Ah, you exist.
Hell
The first time I saw the word, the helpless guppy “e”
stuck between the stern black bars, my catechism
darkened, and forced to write a page of “I,” I
crammed those thick lead marks across my composition
book until it looked like a prison, emblem of my recalcitrance,
the fences I’d have to jump to rid my pencil self of sin,
and saw the place I’d surely end: unkempt, my disobedience
marked in the Hormel Dark Canned Ham on the butcher’s shelf I
imagined was the shape of my soul. Is it inside me, my Interior
Castle, as I lie here bang bang bang bang in this MRI
that began as gentle small-town mending and turned
to coffin laughter. What disaster is it pounding out as I
w
ander in the sound, amorphous as water, strapped to a board,
technicians sliding me out and in like a sequined lady in a magic act
(green smock, hairnet, booties) sawed in half, reassembled
in her bassinet of tricks—Voilà! Hello! Hello! I’m back!
Will it reveal itself, that canned black ham, lodged in my rib cage?
Oh soul. Oh God to petition and plead. Oh Hormel.
The word was “Hell,” and I the helpless guppy in its cage.
Not the first time I knew words were fishes, but this was a burned
barred voice, all traps and tentacles. Hell, I’m seeing cages
everywhere. My new cats shrieking in their black mesh tent,
pressed to my bed. Like living with my future tomb.
Last night one escaped, clung to the tent head like a weathervane,
its yowling fur porcupining out. Let it represent my pain: eluding
doctors, X-rays, squatting in my body, knocking over bowls
as if it moved in one grim night (oh God what a zoo!)
a jaw clamp pain that will not let a screech squeak through.
Teeth-grinding rages. It is said grief comes in stages. In this it’s
like cancer, like Comedies and Tragedies, apartments that are tough to
sell until they’re dolled up to trick a buyer. Almost over, the technician
says. Goodbye! Goodbye! God of my childhood. I’m sliding