JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

From his new poetry collection The Evolution of a Sigh (Hanging Loose Press, 2008): R. Zamora Linmark’s replay of Douglas Sirk’s masterpiece in lurid technicolor.

Watching a Sirk melodrama is like eating a whole box of liqueur-centered chocolate: you feel happy and slightly woozy. Naturally the damaged characters are so much more fascinating than the “normal” ones. The scene in which Dorothy Malone wildly dances the mambo while her outraged father falls to his death has been attempted in many Filipino movies.

Photo: Marylee, honey, he’s so not into you.

After Douglas Sirk’s Written On The Wind
by R. Zamora Linmark

What past isn’t dark? Whose secrets don’t bruise?
Let’s start with the son: a profligate playboy, the booze-
soaked President of the Society for the Prevention
of Boredom, so filthy rich he dusts mornings with
a yellow sports car, uses a bourbon glass for an ashtray,
flies thousands of miles without looking at the sky
for a steak sandwich, and snatches from his down-
by-the-river best friend the soul-searching career-
comes-first-before-the-altar girl. He seduces her
with a hot pink hallway, a lavender suite, red-carpeted
walk-in closet, but finally wins her over with the midnight
blue of Miami. They marry. All is fine until the annual
visit to the doctor (or did it start much before that,
when the wind swept dead leaves into the mansion?)
Regardless, his year-old sobriety ends and childhood
nightmares of whiskey bottles and molestation flashbacks
return. He wakes up, sweating, too terrified to curse
his dreams. This morning, he cries like a baby
to his wife, keeps asking how can he ever give her
a child when he’s sleeping with a silver gun
under his dead? A bedroom door slams. It’s his sister,
the gas station attendant still ripe on her tongue.
She, too, has her drama and mottos—”I’m allergic
to politeness” and “I’m just plain filthy period!”
to nurture; her hobbies—back-alley lusts and wallowing
in elbow-length gloves and strapless gowns. With
the fireplace she lights a cigarette, stands before
the portrait of unrequited love, hesitates, puts on
a mambo record, then disappears beneath a see-through
sunset-orange chiffon gown. But the past, no matter
how rich and powerful, is as useless as their old man,
the oil tycoon who cannot buy out his children’s miseries
now his own magnificent clichéd death, tumbling
down a winding staircase while his son grieves
for a lost child and his dancing daughter blasts the trumpet
solo so loud destiny cannot stop it, except perhaps
those almost-lost afternoons by the river when mulberry
juice passed for kisses, swimming was in the raw,
and tree trunks were skinned perfectly into hearts.