In which half the family reunion drives away from the movie in a rental car...
By Alice George

and Maine’s fat balsam rain begins to fall and the good news
is high beams switch on the same way in every car and the bad

news is the movie was just plain bad one hundred fifty
two minutes of bloated dark shouting that grossed 155

million during its opening weekend and we argue about it all
the way back to the cottages we keep coming back to.

OK fight about what we mean by violent and what
we mean by ridiculous and we can’t really see each other

as the car rounds the black roads that bend to miss
the cold tongues of the Atlantic which we’ll dive into

tomorrow and feel some door click open within
the surprising water precisely the way we remember.

Each sibling, spouse, kid and parent living most
of each day outside and laboring hard to reinvent

ways of seeing each other right now. And in the past.
The inches added to each cousin the only proof optimism

needs and right now we fall into each other’s shoulders
on the tight turn around West Harbor Pond just as we

narrow in on the essential errors of the Hollywood film
(insufficient lighting of the fight scenes coupled

with too many heroes) (which seems the opposite
of the world’s problems the minute I write this).

My sister vows she’ll never be talked into such
bogus trash again and my kids claim they loved it

and if the ride were longer we could sort this July night
into a plot for tomorrow, a plot worth millions.

Alice George lives in Evanston, Illinois, and teaches as a visiting poet in area schools and libraries. She served as an Editor of RHINO for 10 years and is now of the Advisory Board of that award-wining magazine. Her first collection of poetry, entitled This Must Be The Place, will be published by Mayapple Press in late 2008, early 2009.

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