Some Movies Work
By DB Jonas
Featured in our New Lyre Winter 2024 issue.
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Some Movies Work
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time
—John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
Some movies work
the way a ballgame works
when we’ve stepped from the stream
of busy day, when we’ve stepped off the clock
into the blinding green and everyone
has tossed that ticking wristwatch well away
into the quiet air of evening at the park
to sit where time has lost all meaning
and our living’s measure only lives
in the timeless round of at-bats, signals,
signs and innings, and the only evidence
of the expiring light is a long sharp shadow
inching unnoticed into the outfield,
unruffled by the ponderous drama of the game,
by the eccentric ceremonials of the batter in his box,
the sudden crack of ash-wood at the plate,
the oddly distant roar of the incantatory crowd,
and the nervous scuffling antics,
the gimlet stares and sets and blazing deliveries
of our hometown pitcher on the mound.
Some movies work like this.
What wonder some just can’t sit still
to see a careful man adjust his razor at the sink,
to hear a woman softly humming at the window
while rustling maples darken in the street.
Some folks, I understand, are left unsettled
by the emptiness of time, the vacant hours,
the countless scoreless innings of this life.
They find it disconcerting to be dropped
into a world without action, without purpose,
lacking clear direction, lacking plot.
Believe me, I do understand, but not a lot,
and I do have to wonder why it is they ever
even feel they need to make a showing at the park,
when all they really have to see and know
is what we all will know as we file back out
into the saturated night, into the stream,
to the car left waiting
somewhere in the dark.
DB Jonas is author of Tarantula Season, is an American poet who’s work has appeared widely in journals throughout the US, UK, Europe and Israel.
Read more of DB Jonas’ poetry below.
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