In those days Jesse still worked in the movies as the assistant to a cool producer
Who’d courted Jet Li before he was anybody here & to show his stuff Jet Li’d kicked
A hanging begonia out of its macramé & wire basket on the porch of their office at Universal
She told me laughing over the red sauce she’d made the way her mama would she swore pouring
A little extra red wine into the pan then a little more & she was so shy she blushed every time
I teased her friends the gorgeous boys who hung out with her crew of rock-steady girls all
Drop-dead slinky beauties still looking for a break & I wished them well each one of them
& after they’d leave we’d sit back on her leather sofa black like every piece of her furniture & walls
With a few alarming slashes of silver accent now & then & it felt exactly like living in an old Thirties
Noir classic where every one of our nights was steamy but always lost in a black-&-silver sorrow
There were even a few blank silver birthday balloons floating against the ceiling above the bed
& at times like that it could seem all of Sicily unfolded across her face & pooled beneath her
Eyes dark as the distance she’d come from Selinunte & the dirt of her family fields & those
Early graves & wrapped in those black sheets with silver pillows piled around us I kept trying
To find some great consoling exit line of dialogue she hadn’t already read not even in those scripts
Scattered on the floor of her bedroom not even the one she said was really about me holding it up
With one hand—a hipster slacker indie remake of the 1933 horror classic by H. G. Wells
With Claude Rains playing my favorite part of course one I knew by heart The Invisible Man