Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Thirty-three minutes and eleven seconds into the 1976 film “Mikey and Nicky,” you can catch a glimpse of my father. He’s sitting in the back of a bar. He sports a jacket over a white turtleneck. His left arm is around his girlfriend, Ruby. He is a twenty-four-year-old extra. The film stars the actors Ned Beatty, Peter Falk, and John Cassavetes. Mickey is on the run from the mob. In one of the scenes, he and his best friend hide out in a bar in a Black neighborhood.

This film, with my father as an extra, will outlast my memories of him. I imagine the director yelling cut and redoing the scene over and over again. At some point they get it right. If only life were directed to perfection.

Today’s shrewd poem ardently shows how time shreds memories into a dreamlike sequence of events, yet we are preserved in our stories.

Second Paradise
by Chard deNiord

                        “Poetry is a dream made in the presence of reason.”
                        —Adam Zagajewski

I went for a walk with a girl I hardly knew
when I was a boy on a trail by a river
for a film I didn’t know was being made
by a director I couldn’t see or hear
behind his hidden camera in the clouds
and trees as we recited our lines
unwittingly with no idea of the plot
or ending as we walked for miles 
in that paradise of a park, which is why
we were killing it on that cerulean day
in a way that was more real than the trail
itself, which has been razed, I’ve heard,
for a housing development, which means
the world in which we live today
has become an illusion since we both
still walk that trail where we were born
a second time in a paradise we walk
to this day in our heads, although
it’s no longer there, despite the fact it seems
more real than when we were there
enchanted with each other, striking
our tongues against our teeth to light
the tinder between our legs and ears
and then our hearts that needed proof
of fire in the air as we walked like ghosts
until we were lost in a grove beside 
the trail and lay down somewhere
we could never find our way back to
and made love on a bed of moss
despite our fear; where we were eternalized
in the film which we continue to screen
as a non sequitur in quotidian moments, 
like right now on the patio where we
balance our dinners on our knees
and divine the darkness behind 
our eyes to dream awake of that time
we disappeared into a vast which plays 
on the screen that hangs from a cloud
on which our short that is so long
is projected in color one day and black 
and white the next, transcending time
in the way it did that day on our walk 
beside a river in which we witnessed
enough of heaven’s fire in its water
to weld our memory of that ecstatic walk
to a vision that would last in the grass
of days we called forever, although 
we are deluded by the film that has
no credits for the sake of heaven
and witnesses in its showings to the irony
of a metaphysics that surrenders love
and even the river to sweet oblivion.

“Second Paradise” by Chard deNiord. Used by permission of the poet.