I am sitting with my laptop at one end

of a long table, beyond which I can see,

through the window on the far side of the room,

a narrow road sloping upward to a rise –

like the road in WITNESS that Harrison Ford

as John Book, almost fatally wounded,

drives his sister’s VW down to save

the Amish boy and his widowed mother.

Stretched across the top of the rise is a wire,

like the one on the poster for Hitchcock’s

THE BIRDS. Starlings perch there as evening comes –

ready to swoop, if the plot requires,

on the hair-do of an unsuspecting blonde,

or a whole class of theatre-school children.

Stories in the dark: transparent fictions

that frighten and move, tickle and shock,

all following Aristotle’s tale-telling

rules. In the dénouement of CINEMA

PARADISO – masterwork of the flashback –

the famous filmmaker, the ironically,

poignantly named Salvatore Di Vita,

always fearful of loving too much,

weeps as he watches, for the first time,

his dead mentor’s splicing of all the scenes

of longing and lust that were cut from his youth.

The road, at the top of the rise, has become

an untended pathway, flanked by dry-stone walls,

bordered by nettles, brambles, and thistles.

Suddenly…