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The Last Matinée by John Nizalowski I A scorpion sidles across the floor of an abandoned Mojave shack, black rock rising around it in waves of light and heat. A motorcycle slides across wet pavement, flies towards the junction of rivers where the Warrior Twins depart this world, sons of Changing Woman born in the Year of Butterflies. I am death, and the last matinée. Red plush seats in the eternal afternoon, reel after reel offered up to the smooth gods of the con. A sliding door of bars, razor wire shines in the New Mexico sun. Cats lurk in the windows, el gato waiting for food from heaven. You see it now— the sky, the sea, the lost sailor seeking his forgotten home, wine in the barrel, monks singing in the attic. The red sky sheds orange light on her skin, love’s lost wages wrapped in sin, the realm of saxophones and pedal steel guitars, the long dance into eternal night. It’s the last matinée, the audience feels for the door, the stork flies in, the birth of a dying nation, the birth of the lost Grail forever out of reach. The Fisher King is dead. The last matinée. Come in and be cool. A lost breath, a Zen grace of hidden beads, souls, stones, and cat’s teeth— an inmate’s talisman. II Sometimes I feel time slide past like a great, slow serpent. Sometimes I have dreams of being tied face down, naked body stabbed with sharpened sticks like an Apache sacrifice in a John Ford western. The last matinée cowboy rides off into the chameleon sunset seeking buried Mayan pyramids, finds me instead, downing mounds of hot popcorn, butter dripping over the serpent’s long gray and crimson body. A mosaic of Jesus under water, dreams of a Roman philosopher – a man with long, graying blond hair striding El Paso streets half naked, while somewhere in the West elegant waves of dark brown silt dry beneath a desert sun within the deep, deep canyon. Secret waters, green cottonwoods, ash, and moss— the liquid sound a stone gate to blue heaven. III A skull, a rose, an apple, an ear of corn. Chose, and be forever gone. In a place where the river pours over a dam, a realm of watery eternity, they murdered him. He chose the corn and they murdered him, knife blow to the groin. They fled to Kansas, where the corn grows tall in the Aztec sun. A train passing, great surging red engine, my daughters and I wave at the afternoon’s last show, the sun on the golden cottonwoods of declining summer, the bard’s death, grain gone to earth, the coming winter, the resurrection, the last matinée. I walk the path of bones. I pray to Ashoka standing with his magic scepter, forever gone. The movie is over, the bones turned to ash, the heron rises with a dying call, its ancestors burned in a fiery comet that slammed into the sea. Quetzalcoatl reborn on the cinema screen. IV Sunday afternoon and the carnival is ending. Tattoo muscled men pry open bolts with wrenches, tearing down colorful machines while a dirty prairie wind etches the sad-eyed merry-go-round horses standing still in the orange sun sliding light. A lone girl rides the Ferris wheel on its final turn, long blond hair riding the wind’s waves as the red wood seat slides past zenith – her last view of childhood. What was once a dazzling jewel of lighted circles spinning in the star consumed night, now dull and tame in the waning desert sun – the crowds gone, the calliope silent. Feeling the wheel slow, she tightens her grip on the long steel rail, trying to stop time with a dust stung tear. V Haunted by old dreams, he shuffles under gray skies across the abandoned motor court – fake pueblo crumbling from frost and rain. “Damn leg still hurts,” he mutters, while distant blue collar trains moan in the steel rust town. He reaches the jimmied door, closes it gently behind him, falls onto the broken bed, hears the rattle of ancient springs as sacred voices in his head. Pulling up the wine, two thirds done, he downs it in three sweet jags. “Home,” he whispers to his shadow plaster ceiling. “At least until the police shut my movie down.” VI Where does the sacred fire go when its extinguished at the holy time’s ending? And where do the images go when the movie’s over, the arc lamp’s crackling blaze silent, the hero rolled up and stored in the octagonal black box? The brush lifts, the poem ends. The reel ceases with a flapping sound of dying machinery. The wheel slows, stops. Outside the sun is bright despite the afternoon hour. A raven lands – an abstraction made flesh, an algorithmic curve, the half-life of plutonium. Someday, there will be the last mandala poured forth under a dying red sun, the last sacred maze, the final sweeping away of patterned sands into the last slow river on crimson plains. No mountains left as the molecules crawl to a quiet pulse. The last Buddhist dreaming the last mandala in the last universe. VII In Buddha’s temple I break forth from my body, a butterfly splitting the chrysalis wall with fragile wings, each gentle leg unfolding through molecules dissolving, the fading echo of a medieval bell struck by sweat worn mallet. The fish drum measures time’s dying light as my moist soul reaches for Shiva dancing. The physicist said, “All the energy that existed at time’s beginning is with us still.” Flame and drum, shadow and light, the turquoise realm. |
 John Nizalowski is the author of Hooking the Sun, a multi-genre book on Farolito Press. His work has also appeared in Puerto del Sol, Weber: the Contemporary West, Blueline, The Albany Review, The Bloomsbury Review, and elsewhere. Currently, he lives in western Colorado, teaches creative writing at Mesa State College, and is working on a biography of southwestern author Frank Waters. |
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