Category: Movies

I just watched Before Sunrise for the first time since I saw it in the theater in 1995. I haven’t really been able to watch it since then. I also watched Before Sunset for the first time. This is poem is a true story brought back to the surface by those two films.

I wanted to be Ethan Hawke

I walked out of the movie theater / that night in 1995 / holding in my insides / like I’d been gut-shot

the drive back to my apartment / took the rest of my life / trying to write the perfect line / that would make you leave Rochester / and join me in Tucson

I couldn’t see the road with your face / clouding my eyes / I drove like the old man / I was afraid I’d become without you

why did you call me every day? / what didn’t I say / that would have made you love me?

my little red journal couldn’t hold it all / couldn’t trap the longing / free me from that parking lot / where you held my hands in yours / said “we’ll see each other before you go, won’t we?”

my last night in town was in your bedroom / on your bed (an unfortunate preposition) / a cat between us, our hands touching

you were all I wanted / but I still had to leave, had to get out / had to find my own ground

I came to rest in the desert / but 3,000 miles of driving / didn’t do a damn thing to put you behind me

eventually the phone calls stopped / the longing subsided / but not the feeling of missed opportunity

there is no train platform on which to meet in six months / no sweet reunion movie nine years later

just one of those connections that didn’t quite take / a lost chance to make a new universe

I wrote this on a plane trip to San Francisco in 2008, while sitting next to the gentleman described in the poem.

Robert Redford’s Banker

makes perfect check marks
next to the names of Maui restaurants
that he’ll visit when the plane lands.

With measured strokes,
he moves money
from one worthy cause to the next.

The handwriting in his register
shows the passage of time,
a certain revealing tremor in the fingers.

A small picture of the actor —
in his halcyon days —
rests on the tray table next to a bill

from the banker’s club, a map of Maui,
and suggestions for avoiding problems
with Medicare and the tax collector.

He nibbles a deliberate biscotti
and counts to three on his left hand,
fingers pressed, one after another, against his thumb.

Perhaps he’s not counting at all, just
reassuring himself of his own tactile reality,
one not represented by ink on watermarked paper.

The plane touches down, the banker gathers loose papers
to his chest and moves off into the terminal,
searching for his connection, dreaming of the stage.