To The Villain's Side-kick, Monogram Studios

Descending loose and liberal from Paradise Peak, California,    we are Dionysus and Ariadne, the genitalia of the mind in       Cuban heat.   Two walk-ons, we are cast on your fable-spinning Honda,    its engine roaring like the North wind in      Jack London's mind. This long red hair blowing silken in the fingers   of the night, will grey. (Dark as a writer's first draft,      night hugs us.)     We pause, rapt in the classroom of the moon's blue spot,     your body attentive as myth. "You can do it!",      cheers Gravity. She flings a meadowlark, giddy with blue sky and June. We swoop around hairpin turns, skidding on the sands of time.  We fall in slow motion toward crags where gold hides, cryptic     and unwhispering among rattlesnakes. Who will pin us to the big screen over Fresno,  in balance and flight, hawk wings touching between soft-hued dusk     and darkness?     (Who will hold back the Man with the horn from scrapping the whole   project whenlarger faces with box-office pull light up?)     Do you hear a polyphonic melody slumbering in Bach's dead digits, exhumed   to score our exit, right     and left?                          . . . . . . . . I am rusted up, now, you  lovely Myth, in this back lot of traffic    and taxes. I am bound by ropes of wild cucumber and silver lace     that twined around our  mountain lair. They knot my memories.  Golden poppies nod behind my eyes.My arms    are stuffed with question marks.The smell of our Valley,        scorched with summer, dotted with metaphor of mountain oak and fiddle head, glides    into the skull as ripe as the field in Wordsworth's pen.You are receptive of life no more, my love, shepherd of my soul no more.    I    keen    for you as a wolf    in a trap.      . . . . . . . . . A waterfall thunders from the cliff,    horse and rider    over    the    edge. (Note the flicker of an antique reel. The ashes in your bronze cube sift slowly    with uncanny resistance    to a people-less lake in the high    Sierra.)           . . . . . . . Steinbeck knew your weathered ways, you    gun-spinning, hard-riding  player of    bit parts who dies believably. I tuck you, hero of my thousand days,    snugly within coyote and hawk,    my  gate banging in the wind. Meanwhile, the fluttering ribbon of road    that unwound like 1939 celluloid is on the    cutting room floor, and I, small, braced figure (from a Thomas Hardy plot), trudge across the darkening moors of the city, no sidekick's floozy.This poem is very close to my heart because of its subject matter, but coming back to it in different moods over the years has resulted in changes, currently in spacing and arrangement, but because a poet is just as apt to kill a poem in editing it as he is to hone it, I surrender to it now.  I throw it to the big write in the sky  resolving to change it no more. Written December 4th, 2001 © on Dec 04 2001 03:24 AM PST, Carole Dudley    0 • 18 • 8