They're Making This Poem Into a Movie
Erin Murphy
They're making this poem into a movie and it fades in with a close-up of a Bear Island sign,
and just when you're starting to picture me
(or Nicole Kidman as me) in camouflage,
stalking a grizzly, or, even better, huddled
by the fire in a log cabin with stew simmering
on the stove, the camera pans out
to a wide angle and this Bear Island
turns out to be a median strip in Bear, Delaware,
and I'm sitting in the waiting area
of a tire dealership where a guy named Steve
convinces me to go with the Regatta 2
which promises a quiet ride
and excellent wet-road traction
for $60 more than I'd planned to spend,
which, Steve tells me, is only $3 a year per tire more,
and I trust him on this (and here's where
the voice-over kicks in) because
I'm too lazy to do the math and because
I'm impressed that he can say wet-road traction
without sounding like Barbara Walters
and besides, I was hoping to be in the library today,
not inhaling tire treads and listening
to Road Runner reruns, and just think,
if I'd gone to the library you could be experiencing
a poem-movie about Hegel or Matisse,
heck, even Michener would be more interesting
than Michelin (or better yet: Michener on Michelin:
the greatest epic ever written on tires,
with an 85,000-word warranty), yes, the library
is where I'd be now, even though, as I know
you'll be relieved to hear, I'm not the least bit
constipated, which can't be a total non-sequitor
for you, as I'm sure I'm not the only one
for whom the smell of musty old books
combined with recirculated air conditioning
works better than a prescription laxative—
I mean, do not pass go, do not collect $200,
send me straight to the library bathroom,
a place where I spent quite a bit of time
in graduate school when I pretty much survived
on cheese from visiting-author receptions,
enough to turn anybody's system to sludge
and speaking of that library,
let me tell you about that prime example
of an architectural disaster, that brick skyscraper
in the center of campus that looked like
it was giving the finger to the rest of Western Massachusetts,
that giant phallus designed by a man
(had to be) who forgot to take into account
the weight of the books so that one by one
the bricks started popping out of the sides
and falling like Looney Tunes anvils
onto the sidewalks below until the university
closed off the top six stories and built
a chain-link fence around the perimeter,
which made me cross my finger in hopes
that the physicist who calculated the circumference
was more accurate than the architect,
which reminds me of a student I had back then
who grew up in Boston and wrote
that she wanted to be an akitek—A-K-I-T-E-K—
when she grew up (I'm thinking Reese Witherspoon
for her part), and I figure even that girl
would have done a better job on the library,
a building I think of often because,
frankly, I'm jealous of anyone who can fuck up
on such a large, I'm talking massive scale,
as I work on little poems that will never
be sued for amputating the wrong stanza,
never be sold for movie rights, never be the reason
some union production assistant gets to
stand in the studio buffet line next to Nicole Kidman
and e-mail his brother that she's not nearly
as hot in person as she is on-screen,
which is a shame, really,
I mean,
I want my poems to matter that much,
so much that if you hated this poem,
you'd want to sue me, yes, sue me ... I want you
to sue me, I do—I want you to put this poem down
right now and find yourself a lawyer,
tell her about your pain and suffering,
demand damages—I mean, you endured
line after line about my bowel movements,
for god's sake, and don't forget to tell her
I used the word fuck—twice now—and here's a few more: fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck—hell, I'll give you all the fucks you want just to get somebody—anybody—to give one.
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