across the aisle from me in the theater

across the aisle from me in the theater―

this was at shattuck cinemas, an old

multiplex in downtown berkeley,

on a friday evening in june 2014―

a woman yelled “Oh My God!”

during the penultimate section

of the film the rover, when the brother

of robert pattison’s character,

whom he’d been imploring at gunpoint

to explain why he’d left him for dead earlier,

produces a gun of his own from under a pillow.

then, after a crescendo of back-and-forth shouts

between them, as well as a few interjections

from guy pearce’s character in the other room

where he held several other just-awoken baddies in check,

the brother’s gun went off and robert

pattison fell to the ground, and this lady

gasped as if she’d been shot as well,

like those french people reacting with alarm

when the lumière brothers premiered

their short film about a train arriving in a station in 1896.

those parisians, whether exiting the theater at night

or during the day, would have been hit by the cold,

for it was january, the same month as paul verlaine’s

death and funeral, the latter of which his fellow poet paul fort

described in a poem that includes the lines

“Et donc le plus beau jour fut un jour de beau froid”

or, as translated by francophile david yendley,

“The finest of which, was a day fine and cold”

and “Toussotant, frissonnant, glissant sur le verglas”

or “Coughing and shivering, slipping on the sheet ice.”

so there was beauty and hazard enough to deal with

in the real world, regardless of what artists,

armed with technology, threw at these people.

perhaps I should have written SPOILER ALERT

at the beginning of this poem, to warn all those

who haven’t seen the rover yet.

but you could know the whole of life in advance

and still catch your breath all the sudden

at a detail you watched arrive

like a train pulling into a station.

that’s called feeling, nothing more,

nothing fancy, just a word stretched so thin

it seems to dissipate when it hits that definition.

but that’s the point, isn’t it? to recognize something

and then move on, on into the theater’s hallway,

where I discovered emily had a rolled-up poster

for the rover in her hand, and out onto the crowded sidewalk,

where she and christian and I navigated the mix

of street riff-raff and people out on the town,

through the warm berkeley night

to the hard-to-find entrance to the parking garage,

where we debated the very last scene,

which I won’t ruin, especially out of respect

for those who’ve seen it but have forgotten

it’s what we already know that surprises us the most.