Marlowe Catches a Catnap in the Hollywood Public Library

Face flat on the broad expanse of readingroom tableland,
the slow puddle oozing from unmoved mouth
bears a striking resemblance to a lemon tree, wood grain
reprising the role it made famous,
a performance so overwhelmed by resemblance
that a conveniently passing Bette
rests her Davis eyes on the fortuitous collaboration
of spit and tablewood and is overcome by the sublimity
of chance. “Son, son,” she shakes his shoulder, “Son,
look thee what fortune hath bred in the dam of thy mouth.
Methinks the many-fingered Fates
do make merry with thy lips, that there be auguries
potent as dregs to be read in the image sketched yonder,
that perhaps the heavenly realm hath breached our borders
and rushes to infiltrate thy form to a purpose
bred on high,” she contorts her voice to a stage whisper,
“or else sired low in Old Nick’s dark and hirsute loins.”

Marlowe unpeels himself from sleep and stares up ,
awash in the murk of waking. “Listen lady,
I don’t know if you’re accustomed to rousing
strangers and speaking in tongues, but buzz off.”

“Zounds, but thou bear likeness to another man I know!”
She tugs at Marlowe’s hair testingly. “Alas, thy pelt
is thy own, while Humphrey wears a wig to foliate
the desert of scalp that dominates his caput. My friend,
thou art my Bogie un-Delilah-ed by time’s razing.

Why, it seems that thou hath bent history’s arrow
Back upon itself that I might observe
the true circuity of its coursing. I thank thou, son,
and take my leave to procure a phial
of that elixir known as lemonado, that its paralyzing acid
might burn time’s etching from my face as it has from thine,”

she says, as in the stacks a familiar librarian
runs her finger along the course of her lips,

runs her finger,
stifling an endless romance of cigarettes,
the rigid consonants of a Slavic tongue.

A Road Map Back

Up until this point, I have not mentioned the sectional breaks in Wry Argology (oh-so-cleverly designated as "Reels"), but I figured that I might point my doubtless devoted readership back to see how the land laid aroudn the various poems. The first Reel, titled "The Coming Attraction," runs for only two poems, "American Movie Palace" and "Trailer." The second reel, "The Set-Up," runs from "Starring" to the last poem I've posted, "Gen. Sternwood." Each reel begins with an epigraph. They are:

Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too.
-Frank O'Hara

and

Mechanism is not itself power. Mechanism, without power, can do nothing. Let a watch be contrived and constructed ever so ingeniously; . . . it cannot go without a weight or spring . . . . The spring acting at the centre, will produce different motions and different results, according to the variety of the intermediate mechanism . . . but in all cases, it is necessary that the spring act at the centre.
-William Paley

respectively.