The
Starlight Theater
1.
As though in sleep,
before a
blank, enormous screen,
we'd be some single,
true thing yet.
We'd always join a crooked line of cars
inching
through a gate,
then ride the place's
asphalt waves
to find our numbered,
preselected spot.
Every family had their own.
Engine cut, our Buick angeled forward
and upward, as though for
lift-off,
and my dad would hook a
speaker
popping and
shorting,
to a window rolled down
slightly.
Then we'd sit and wait,
drowsy now
in clouds
of coats and special
pillows.
Was that looming screen ahead
a fabulous, open space,
or a thing imposed
on the sky to make it
mean
or amount to something
more? As night came close,
the giant images
flickered on.
Was our purpose here
to dream?
I saw skeletons rise up from underground
and start dancing in a
line. . .
--or to be watchful
and believe?
Saw a man alone in a desert,
buried to
the neck.
2.
By fourteen or fifteen, I couldn't get it straight;
people
there were gracious and humane,
yet miserable bigots too.
On our cross-country stationwagon
excursion to
I'd seen lightning rip and flash
and travel jagged all the
way
from the sky out in the
distance
to the ground.
And everything revolved, when we arrived,
around my
mother's mother,
the one clear connection,
living, that I knew of,
to the family line or
circle.
The August air around her house
was practically swimable;
but fireflies crackling
out of grasses meant that
something
near was burning.
Then around in back I recognized
a garden (this was a
Golden Age)
from photos of my grandpa
(I'd only known him dead),
jutting jaw
and giant clippers
among the
gorgeous, tender roses.
Nineteen-sixty, maybe sixty-one. The leafy boundaries
of the lawn out front,
at night,
made a goofy music out of
gulping
sounds I'd
never heard.
And I did, I crept out on the grass,
to those densely green
and complicated borders,
in the dark and listened
It was a world
It was a burning musical garden
terrifying and
ridiculous.
3.
At White Sands,
all at once,
strangers
became relations:
my mother's sisters,
Dorothy and Rosa Lee,
and several of my dad's
scattered brood,
Johnny, maybe Betty.
The sand was clean, you could wash in it.
But all we did was climb the dunes & careen back down
This was apparently the point of it all
And the whiteness of the sand
was also the point of it
all
The whiteness proclaimed Monumental,
and this particular spot
out of a whole nation
Preserved,
though the
sand itself is always moving.
It defied our trying
to move
by sliding beneath our
feet,
by slipping through our
clutching hands.
And I remember too we'd come from church
in crinkly, circular
skirts and slips,
that only made the
climbing-falling harder
and hilarious
to those suns who set us
turning:
Uncle Willard, Bob and Aunt Lucille.