"Hands Over the City"


A walk
on gilded splinters


in terrycloth
slippers

or felt like they
made me wear at Sans-Souci--

polishing the ancient slats--
they should pay you!

quiet as a childhood spent
at Schinkel's Cinecitta

except for the damned dubbing
the same six voices

in every other movie
we ever saw--Barabbas,

The Campbells Are Coming,
A Bullet For Django--RCAF base theatres

then a point of pre-multiplex
distribution somewhere

between 42nd St. &
the edges of the "Old Colonial" Circuit--

so that the unaccented studio
bark colonised my kidspace

bigtime even if I never
even heard Burt's authentic Palermo

grandee or the Calabrese
striver they must have got for Rod Steiger's

Neapolitan Robert Moses/
Donald Trump though

Rosi can't resist letting
him mime out a scene in an empty

office as something out of The Big Knife
volcanic method emotions

rubbing his face out of a broken lamp
with a dampened hanky

and neck sweat for
lip-readers, but then re-embedded

beneath Etna,
under Cinemascope.