Old Movies: Sundays, Cottonport, Avoyelles Parish

I remember those old movies--
Especially Sunday afternoon easterns
    in the real theater in Cottonport,
    Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana.

The theater still smelled of gunpowder
    from the westering of Saturday night:
    Hopalong Cassidy had raced in the moonlight
    to do abiding justice;
    the Cisco Kid and Pancho had saved
    all of us from blackhatted mustachos.
    Lash Larue had whipped his way out of an ambush.
And there was dust from the continueds.
    The continueds had been classic:
    white men in khaki with black pistols
    driving a woodgrain stationwagon through improbable trails
    in Rhodesia--
    all to save a white virgin.

I remember Anne Miller's silk stockings:
The camera edged unhelpfully to show me what I wanted to see.

 I remember Donald O'Connor, slick and ineffective,
    but there, dancing, moving against
    what I knew to be a simple screen.
   Bing Crosby, colored to seem good.
    Gene Kelly, whose feet I always doubted.
I remember them all: Tab Hunter, his chest muscles
    heaving against Natalie Wood's firm breasts.
I wallowed in the rich luxury  of the Amazon.

I especially remember the falling feeling
    that the show would be bad, that
    the borrowed thirty-five cents would be wasted.

___________________

Baton Rouge
January, 1994