[In London, 1973, watching Ultimo Tango a Parigi]

← v12n2, Fall 2013

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In London, 1973, watching Ultimo Tango a Parigi

From the theater’s balcony, might I not have

Seen you through smoke broken by

The light from the projector, or among those others

Who walked out into humidity after Paul, 48, is shot

And Jeanne, 19, holds the gun she fired, and

Yet I drop from another day, the air dieselized

And silted with Thames water and the near-knowledge

That edges are best kept edgy, the edge of the street

Where I fall into traffic, the remembered black

And white buzzing in living rooms of Edge

Of Night, or the way the blinded Earl of Gloucester

Jumps off the edge of the cliff and dies on

The way down, crumpled into nothingness,

And Marlon Brando also years after weighing in

At twice what I weigh, weighted down, thirty

Years earlier crumpling on the Parisian balcony, his

Last act sticking chewing gum under the railing,

And the page I am reading turns itself, and

The trellis that holds up the rows of grapes

Tumbles over, of its own free will and decay,

Wooden to pieces, stabbed by weather, heart

Impaled by what isn’t heart, for a couple

Of hours in the darkness, the time it takes

For night to take hold, when I want the lights

Out or just down for a moment, hand ready on the switch.

film memory desire

Edward Mayes

Edward Mayes is the author of five books of poetry including Works and Days (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), winner of the Associated Writing Programs Prize for Poetry, and First Language (University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), winner of the Juniper Prize. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review , The Best American Poetry , The Gettysburg Review , Harvard Review , The Kenyon Review , The Massachusetts Review , The New Yorker , The Southern Review , and Poetry , among others. He is also the coauthor, with his wife Frances Mayes, of three books about Tuscany: In Tuscany (Broadway Books, 2000), Bringing Tuscany Home (Broadway Books, 2004), and The Tuscan Sun Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, 2012). Mayes is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and both the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award and the Gordon Barber Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He previously served as the director of the creative writing program at Santa Clara University. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, and Cortona, Italy. Photo by Steven Rothfeld