2001: A Space Odyssey [by Mark Jarman]

2001:  A Space Odyssey

 

First, they threw up beside their towels

Laid on the sand.  One said he had to repocket

His paraphernalia and threw up again

Into a handful of keys.  The other said, “Whoa.”

Then, I led them into the cool dark of the movie theater

Where they slumped, as if coolness and darkness

Were weights on their chests.  But safe –

It was safe for us in there.

A family padded in next to us across the aisle,

Three kids, mother, father, trailing sand and heat.

And the screen lit up with trailers

And the matinee feature, Kubrick’s sci fi epic,

Newly released.  We settled in.  My friends sank

Further under the weight of reflected light,

They were more like the towels

They’d left on the beach beside their puddles.

Mescaline, as I remember.  I was their babysitter.

Late sixties summer, as I remember –

 

I’d seen a former youth minister in the beach crowd.

He’d left his wife. He had a new haircut. 

He saw me see him as I entered

The theater with my tripping friends.

It was not a pleasant look of recognition.

It was a look that said I know you know.

And I did know.  His wife had said to my father, their pastor,

“How would you like to have sex with a bag of shit?”

It was about what had come between them.

 

I was eager to leave for that other planet, college,     

And couldn’t imagine regretting my absence.

The movie ended.   The father across the aisle leaned toward me

And said, “What the hell did that mean?”

Back out in the sun, on the blinding pavement,

I thought I could have told him.  Not now, though.

 

One of those friends leans a cello back and begins.

One flies apart on his own wings.

It is not too late to pray for us all, living or dead,

Or simply to bring us all to mind for one moment.

 

first published in Literary Imagination. Pictured: director Stanley Kubrick, whose movies did amazing things with certain wonderful pieces of music by Strauss, Strauss, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Ligetti, and Shostakovich. not to mention "Daisy" and "Singing in the Rain.".

Comments

[Robert Sward]

Lovely to see this poem of 70s beachside youth and transformation in Redondo Beach as only Mark Jarman can tell it shared here. Thanks!