First
Reel
Stan is sloping in his writing chair
in the Oceana Hotel, Santa Monica,
dreaming of Ulverston.
Baby lighthouses push out of the turf
and grow toward the mouth of the fog.
Bowler-hatted menhirs wait
as he and a fat man carry
a chest full of pantomime costumes
out of the cloud observatory.
In the dream he realises
it is the Ark of the Covenant.
The land is shaking itself in waves,
snapping bowlers up
to eclipse the sun.
Stan sleeps through the earthquake
dreaming of a Bible full
of celluloid. He dreams the clouds
are turning into gulls.
He dreams about his molars
becoming flowers.
Intermission
Trailer:
JEAN HARLOW IS 'PANDORA'!!
1
Pandora with a multiplicity of boxes
releasing all the hats into the world,
releasing all the question marks,
releasing all the moustaches.
A thousand chocolate cakes gather in the air
like barrage balloons, wheel,
and vanish across the city.
She is the only thing unchanged
by all her loosenings, she is
a contained woman.
2
Pandora is getting married
wrapped in the set-builders' sheets:
her train lies spattered and streaked,
spiralling down the unstained stairs
as though each step
was another bed
belonging to her nest of bachelors.
Her bouquet is made of weevils
and cabbage whites.
3
Pandora is Madonna and
Holmes is her child, deerstalker over his
solemn somnolent brows.
The attributes of pipe and magnifying glass
are offered to him by Watson and Lestrade
in the guise of Saints John and Paul.
Later he will try and find
everything she's ever lost
and fail.
4
Pandora has been sacked from a soap opera.
Her expose would crack the set
but the medication makes her ramble.
She is now twenty years older than
the age she usually leaks,
But love is making her young again.
Pandora is on a swing wearing no pants:
her vaginal pendulum is driving time
backwards into icy combs.
5
You can leave anything with her now:
children, battleships, toiletries,
she' ll never peek or pree. She'll not provoke
an international incident by
unlacing her boot or bodice,
unplaiting the DNA of forests by
loosening her hair, or
unravelling the laws of turbulence
whilst in her bath, so that the taps
gape at her like drowning fish.
She constrains herself from opening
cages in faraway zoos, from letting go
all birds in the markets that she walks through,
even the carcasses of steer and pig.
She won' t smack down a barricade
or negate the laws of quarantine,
nudge the elbows of scientists
clutching lethal test-tubes, or sit on buttons
in red-blinkered bunkers.
She is content to smile without
showing her teeth.
Second Reel
The lighthouse on the Hoad has a grey
bowler on its head as though here
only the hat is ageing. This balances with
Stan's face on film, everywhere staying young.
When I climb up to that monopode
it's varicosed with fissures filled with white
like tiny lightnings. Where the conductor runs
through concrete into earth
someone has inscribed
'All things will find happiness.'
I contemplate briefly
the happiness of bark,
the happiness of nylon,
I contemplate the happiness of film.
There is a general mist, what must be
the usual low roar of Ulverston,
dogs' voices rising amongst the birdsong.
The bay is lost in a greyish orange
and the hills are bow-shouldered, bent away.
The town is like a spilled and trampled reel,
grey, crackling, almost liquid.
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