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United Artists Theatre, L.A.<br />
ROBERT EASTWOOD<br />
We stood in a line, curled from the theatre<br />
around the corner of Olympic,<br />
stretched into smoggy gloam of a summer evening.<br />
“King Kong” on the marquee—lighting promise<br />
as lights would dazzle from a rescuing ship.<br />
My friend James had been here before,<br />
had seen “Gone With The Wind” & “Rear Window,”<br />
& now we waited in line for an old ’33 movie.<br />
Inside’s ornate as an old castle in Spain, he said,<br />
naked boobs in the corners. Across the street faint<br />
paint on bricks up fifty feet advertised cigars.<br />
“Best on Eternity Street.” That’s what Broadway was<br />
long ago, James said, because it led to a cemetery.<br />
I had then another awareness—which joined<br />
a string of similars that suddenly dawned on me<br />
at sixteen—that nothing lasts forever.<br />
Nothing is eternity. Where that Packard sits at the curb<br />
was once dirt, & before that, a river,<br />
or bed of an ocean, & cigars by the millions have been<br />
turned at the end of a hand into smoke.<br />
-9-
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