From Rattus: Movie of the Week (a TV culture poem)

Movie of the Week

A small man climbs

Hurries but keeps his hand

clamped that it glide in care

Care not to lose that grip

For him each splintering riser yawns

And the rail sits to mock his inches

Like a tool that measures, the bar insists

“You must be so tall”

The music tells the scene starts comic

Fingers walk a piano’s high keys

A bassoon blat and the uniformed man

Hid on a corner stool, perched on a narrow

Plank gangway that skirts the bell tower

Lowers his binocular and focuses one eye

On the dwarf

“Is there word?”

“No, major, none. You must come down.”

The actor doing journeyman’s work

Though in wartime, the strong fighters gone,

he may be not an unlikelihood

In Hollywood he is, and plays the funny servant

The script calls for dithering, which he does

Begs his charge take sustenance

The major puts a finger to his lips

His glass he takes up and a woman

Pious among nuns in a nurse’s smock

Stops in the garden below, face grown wistful

She picks a flower

A rubicund poppy

A sister calls to her and she tucks this

Embarrassedly

In her pocket

Movie of the Week

Sheila, What’s Happening to Us

Rattus

(2017, Stephanie Foster)