Page 22 - Poems

This is where I forget you, this is how I forget you — with
the ease, the absurd ease, I can forget ears and knees, even
pulse, forget liver and ligaments when they function, forget
that breath nestling between eyes. Forget you for the many
hours between before and after, those hours between that skitter,
slide and somersault, then sledgehammer the base of the skull.
James Bond saves us. Fact, shaken or stirred. James Bond and lifelong
nemesis Spectre – that epitome of concerted villainy striving for cosmic
necrosis – save us, albeit unwittingly; save Isa, Nico and me, and five-
hundred-odd other cinephiles gathered in a usually arthouse cinema
lapping the shorelines of Canal de l’Ourq. Bond for whom I left you
on Rue du Renard. Bond who bubble-wraps us in celluloid for one
hundred and fifty minutes, with hermetic seal on mobile phones, on
doors and windows, on the mind. Bond who whizzes around the world
in those one-fifty minutes, cruising from Zócalo to MI6 at Vauxhall
Cross, or was it Forum Romanum first, and onwards to the Austrian
Alps, stepping from black calf-leather encased feet to a Messerschmitt-
Bölkow-Blohm Bo 105 chopper to the familiar, now super-enhanced,
Aston Martin DB10 to – ô bliss – a railway carriage on the Oriental
Desert Express and then, who knows, maybe onto wings? One
hundred and fifty minutes of unknowing. One hundred and fifty
minutes of safety we’ll never hold so lightly, popcorn tubs in the palms
of our hands. One hundred and fifty minutes of Bond rescuing earth
and its denizens, although Mexico City (where the dead are alive, foretells
a title card) and Dr. Madeline Swann, both among the saved – collateral
godsend, that, all in two days’ work for our hero – are wilfully
unimpressed, and, alas, not even remotely grateful to be alive (still,
not pealed by merriment either unlike three of us in the middle of row
seven). And now, the roads of Rome – all the way from fictional
Palazzo Cardenza (verily Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire) and real Piazza
Navona to the banks of the Tiber and Ponte Sisto through Quattro
Fontane then Teatro di Marcello – near expire in terror, as the asphalt
and cobble, the wayside stone pines and cast-iron streetlamps
(bedecked in ugly LED) quake, as oddly-empty streets are scalded by
maniac tyres, as a flaming Jaguar C-X75 is about to be torn by the pain
of survivor’s shame, the shame of he who cannot win the swag stakes
and must pray for another day, another battle. Another day, another
battle (always await on screen), with Sam Smith’s Writing on the Wall
stating the obvious: I’ve been here before… One hundred and fifty minutes
of Bond killing and kissing (more of one, less of the other, many a time
the two well-nigh together), and blasting swards of city squares, desert
and sky (all in a good cause, of course, saving earth and its denizens).
And here, attention, or maybe memory, will tailspin somewhere
near Tangier, with the rest a teleidoscope of unchosen instants. The

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