From A Movie Balcony
Memory is mysterious, it is the movie book inside ones head that never has to pay the price of admission. The chemicals of budding adolescence kicked into warp speed overdrive. The movie book now has a new chapter to explore. Many days and nights of flickering thought frames in Movieville. It was a weird harmony that Joey would be reading through the novels of Henry James at the time Cassandra walked over the threshold of his Door of Perception. A fair young woman from the Pennsylvania farmlands comes to keep house for a fractured fairytale family. Curious, his fascination with the novels of Alduous Huxley yet a bit in the perspective of one of his future selves.An arc plays out bit by bit day by day. Movie scripts in his mind composing scenarios of what is and what appears to be on a magic screen of wishfulness. His eyes grown wide, mind field explosions.
The archetypal boy in a young man's body encountering nature’s witch spells of unaccountable allures. He remembers her painting a pastel mermaid, light hair swept back. Half girl, half fish tail, golden aquamarine. Perched on a rock by the waves of a motionless sea. Another lost door into a past that he never quite escaped. Always waiting there inside of pages forever crashing backward tides pulling him out to a sea of strangely familiar currents.
Movie reels from days to years of Cinemascope memory. Ghosts of trees. Textures of light playing on hair and faces. See the small figures still through the wide end of a telescope. Everything is at one and the same time both too much and not enough. The effects of merely existing and the metaphysics of desire.
(We are ghosts now and then. Love is a musical composition played in theories of the soul.)
Millport and Catharine Creek a living painted mosaic creating mythic backdrops for inner eyes of imagination.
Somehow young Joseph is signed up for a three day weekend at the Chemung County 4-H club camp. Maybe it was sponsored by a local church, who remembers? The camp scenes are rather faded now. Only scraps of memory are retained. He is thirteen years old, primed for the precocious adventures into the opposite natures seeking expression around exploratory campfire evenings. A novel experience to go from utterly naive impressionistic boyhood to actual tactile encounters over the course of one piquant weekend. Our young hero was bitten by the Vampire Hormone, that long lived compulsion of the mind and flesh. Perhaps something similar in kind may have happened in the near future with Cassandra now that the skin had been pierced. It was not to be. When Joseph returned from his excursion into adolescent sensorium she was gone, returned to her parents' Pennsylvania farm never to be seen or heard from again. So that was that, thank you very much Henry James.
Poetry by Chaucer Whethers
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Written on 2026-07-14 at 15:02
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