Whistle and I'll Come To You (1968)

The colonel, who remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India, was of opinion that if Parkins had closed with it it could really have done very little, and that its one power was that of frightening. 

Among writers of ghost stories, few are regarded more highly than the Englishman M. R. James (1862-1936). For James, the writing of his stories was secondary to the telling of them to his students and friends at Cambridge and later at Eton. He dedicated his first collection of stories “To all those who at various times have listened to them.” The book was called Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary, and it appeared in 1904. It includes what is regarded as one of James’s best stories, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad.”(1) 

Jonathan Miller, one of the quartet of writer/performers that made up the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe, gave up performing in 1962 and turned to directing for stage and screen. Already well known for his unconventional 1966 film production of Alice in Wonderland, he directed an adaptation of the M. R. James story, its title shortened to Whistle and I'll Come To You, for the BBC Omnibus series for broadcast in 1968. It was so popular that the BBC repeated it at Christmas in ’69 and it inspired a series of Ghost Stories for Christmas, starting on 1972, based on other James stories. 

In the story, Parkin is a young professor of ontography, which is “the human response to the natural environment,” who goes to a seaside town in Suffolk called Burnstowe at the end of term to work on his golf game. In the film he’s a middle aged man who doesn’t play golf who goes for a week to an unidentified seaside town. After settling in at an old inn, Parkin keeps his distance from the other guests, sitting at a separate table at dinner. One of the other guests, known in the story as the Colonel, asks him if he would like to join him for a round of golf, but Parkin declines. He is there to do some sightseeing, take in the dunes and the local cemetery. The Colonel tells him it’s too spooky for him. 

On the strand, Parkin walks briskly, takes his lunch on the dunes, and climbs a low cliff to examine a quite dilapidated graveyard. One of the tombstones, on the very edge of the cliff, has been eroded, exposing some bones. Parkin sees something and finds an old object in the exposed grave. He puts it in his pocket, muttering “Finders, keepers,” and returns to the beach. Walking along, he notices a lone figure some distance behind him. 

Back at the guesthouse that night, Parkin takes the object he discovered out of his pocket. It’s some sort of bone whistle with an inscription carved on it. After cleaning some earth out of it, Parkin takes a pencil rubbing of the inscription, and makes out the Latin words “Quis es iste qui venit” – Who is this who is coming? Parkin raises the whistle to his lips and blows into it. It produces a clear note, and as soon as Parkin stops blowing, the sound of a great wind arises outside and he has a vision on the lone figure standing on the beach. The wind continues and Parkin goes to bed with a perplexed look on his face. 

At breakfast the Colonel asks Parkin “Do you believe in ghosts?” Parkin, all the while eating his grapefruit and haddock, informs the Colonel of his skepticism of the “survival of the human personality.” The Colonel then says, after Hamlet, “there are more things in heaven and earth than a dreamt of in philosophy." To which Parkin replies, “There are more things in philosophy than are dreamt of in heaven and earth.” This reply gives Parkin much satisfaction, but later in the day, alone on the beach, he hears himself repeat the opposite – there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 

That night, Parkin has disturbing dreams of being chased down the beach by something unseen. He awakes to a shout. Closing his eyes, we see him turning to run from an object, a piece of clothing standing erect by itself and moving toward us. Parkin awakes again with a loud start. He turns on the light and tries to read until he can fall asleep again. 

After breakfast, a maid asks him on which of the two beds in his room he would like the blanket placed, since they were both slept in the night before. Parkin insists that he slept in just the one bed and there was no one else in the room. Who is this who is coming? repeats in Parkin’s mind. He will find out. 

The film is only 42 minutes long, but it’s plenty of time for Jonathan Miller to insinuate us into Parkin’s terrorized mind. Michael Hordern plays Parkin as a marginally batty, typically eccentric academic who lives very much inside his own world. He putters about and mutters to himself, almost as if he’s narrating a drama all his own, humming tunes that only he can hear. With what boyishness he charges about in the countryside – the strand and the woods – which is strangely deserted and overgrown with brambles and vines. The locations – in Norfolk and Suffolk – are perfectly chosen to reflect Parkin’s self-isolation. And Miller’s staging and clever use of sound make the nightmare scenes uncannily like the real thing. The last confrontation between Parkin and a poltergeist is more spine-tingling than any of the latest, CGI-driven horror movies precisely because what Parkin sees almost doesn’t appear to be anything at all. Some have suggested that it might only have been a figment of Parkin’s fevered intelligence. But when the Colonel responds to his moans of terror and sits him back down in his bed, Parkin's rational mind quickly reasserts itself as he mutters, “Oh, no” again and again. 

Whistle and I’ll Come To You is a quite perfect film that captures the atmosphere of M. R. James’s best ghost story. 

(1) The Robert Burns poem of the same title has nothing to do with the story.

The Thing From Another World

It is useless to judge a movie that belongs to a specific genre according to the standards of a different genre. What is required of a comedy – that it must be funny – is, one might think, obviously inapplicable to a suspense movie or an action movie. This rule wasn’t so obvious to the critics who, in 2012, voted Hitchcock’s Vertigo as the greatest movie of all time on BFI’s Sight and Sound poll, demoting Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, which had been #1 on every prior poll since 1962, to second place. Were they trying to argue that Vertigo was more than just a great suspense movie? (In 1960 Stanley Kauffmann said it was “an asinine, unredeemed bore.”) 

As Halloween approaches, horror films abound. Cable TV channels are serving up the usual fare, from 90-year-old classics like Dracula and Frankenstein all the way to more recent chillers like Insidious (2010) and Mama (2013). The only way to properly assess any of these movies is by gauging their effectiveness at being scary. The only movie that I can recall being genuinely frightened by was William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Even people who are skeptical of the existence of Satan were frightened by it, because the skill with which it was made created the possibility at least for the length of the movie. (Many movies scared me when I was a boy, but only because I was a boy.) 

I first saw the 1951 Howard Hawks production of The Thing from Another World when I was a boy – when space travel was still in the planning stages. It was based on a story first published in 1938 in a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction. Today we look at the science fiction movies from before World War II and try to keep ourselves from laughing, but as a literary genre it was already highly developed. 

I haven’t read the story “Who Goes There” by John W. Campbell, Jr but a synopsis makes obvious that it was more complex than Hawks’s film adaptation. The 1982 John Carpenter remake of The Thing gets much closer to the story. (1) Howard Hawks noticed the popularity of science fiction stories after the war and bought the rights to “Who Goes There” for his production company Winchester Pictures. When the screenplay was written, by Charles Lederer, the story was drastically simplified: the “creature” was transformed from a 4’ tall 3-eyed blob that had the ability to alter its form by absorbing other creatures into a 7’ tall vegetable life form (played by James Arness) that must propagate its species in blood-soaked earth – the blood to be harvested from animals and humans. 

A reporter, Ned “Scotty” Scott, arrives at a snowbound Officers Club in Anchorage Alaska (Elmendorf Air Force Base was established after the war in Anchorage, but the name of the base isn’t given). He’s looking for a story and within minutes he’s handed one when Capt. Hendry is ordered to fly north to a camp on the ice near the north pole where an expedition led by Dr. Carrington has reported the crash of a mysterious “aircraft.” 

Upon arriving at the camp, Capt Hendry takes some of the scientists and flies to where the crash took place. They discover a round craft that melted through the ice on impact and froze there. An exposed piece of it is made of an unknown metal alloy. When they attempt to blow the craft out of the ice with thermite charges, it catches fire and explodes. On further inspection, they find a body has been thrown clear of the craft and quickly frozen in the ice. The men use axes to hack out a slab of the ice in which the body is deposited and take it with them back to the base camp. Due to a mishap involving an electric blanket, the ice melts and what was frozen inside it comes to life and escapes. The creature is attacked in the snow by sled dogs and when the men retrieve the dogs’ bodies, they find the creature’s severed hand. When they bring the hand, covered in the dogs’ blood, inside, it comes to life. Dr. Carrington notes that it was the blood that revived it. Later, the creature breaks into the camp’s greenhouse, kills two scientists and hangs them from the rafters above seedlings it has planted, using the men’s blood as nourishment for developing alien pods. When Capt Hendry decides that the creature has to be destroyed, Scotty says “This is the biggest story since the parting of the Red Sea!” Dr. Carrington suggests that they mustn’t destroy the creature, and that they should instead try to communicate with it. Trying to appeal to Capt Hendry in the name of human progress, Carrington tells him “We split the atom!” To which the pilot Lt. Dykes replies, “Yes, and it sure made the world happy!” 

The movie is science fiction only tenuously. The threat is just as supernatural – non-human – as any vampire or werewolf. In straight parlance: the Boogeyman. What is missing is a Doctor Van Helsing or a gypsy woman who knows what’s needed to neutralize the threat. Instead in The Thing there are scientists who attempt to make sense of the creature and a “mad” scientist whose stupidity almost gets everyone killed. A romantic storyline between Capt Hendry and Nikki Nicholson – one of only two women in the script – is thrown in for comic relief. (Margaret Sheridan is given top billing in the end credits. None of the actors are identified in the opening credits.) 

The movie moves along surprisingly quickly. The only scenes that drag are the two between Kenneth Tobey (Capt Hendry) and Margaret Sheridan (Nikki Nicholson). There is zero chemistry between them, but the failure of their mutual attraction to ignite isn’t the fault of the actors. Such scenes serve to increase our concern for the characters when they become imperilled. James Arness was cast as the creature because of his 6’7” stature. After landing the role of Matt Dillon in the Gunsmoke series, Arness, who is the brother of Peter Graves, refused to talk about his role in The Thing. 

In several scenes the dialogue overlaps – the actors deliver their lines before others are finished talking. This is supposed to be a characteristic of Howard Hawks’s direction, and some critics jumped to the incorrect conclusion that Hawks had directed The Thing besides producing it. Since the U.S. Air Force features prominently in the film, the producers tried to enlist their assistance in the making of the film. The Air Force declined because they didn’t want to be associated with movies about flying saucers. 

Not having seen the film for a few decades, I found it extremely well made - better, in fact, than I remembered it. Despite its age, I doubt that audiences today could keep up with it. It's creation and manipulation of suspense is masterful. How many horror movies since it was made have "borrowed" from it? Ridley Scott's Alien would've been unthinkable without it. Even if the "thing" is a little simplified for an alien, it has a powerful presence even when it's not in the scene - just as Scott's alien, whose proportions were cleverly concealed from view, had. Unlike too many classics, The Thing is worthy of the title. 

In 2001, The Thing from Another World was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry. 

(1) In 2011, a prequel to Carpenter’s film — also entitled The Thing — was released, while a new feature based on the original “Who Goes There?” story was announced in 2020.

The Ape Woman

Every now and then I read a review of a movie that has been “revived” – an old film, fondly remembered by all, is given practically a new lease on life with a brand new print, is shown in theaters again to a generation of people that perhaps has only known it by reputation, and the film’s greatness is reaffirmed. Lately, however, this practice of revival has included films released decades ago to few or bad notices that someone (who?) has determined is worthy of a second look. A new print of the film is stamped, digitally mastered, and re-released. And because the quality of movies today is generally execrable, the rediscovered movie attracts some favorable attention, is shown at a film festival, made available for online streaming and released on DVD/Blu-Ray to collectors. 

The latest movie to benefit from this retrofitting trend, whose re-release is just in time for the Halloween season, is an obscure Marco Ferreri opus called La Donna Scimmia or The Ape Woman. (The film’s French title explicitly shifts the main character: Le Mari de la femme à barbe – The Husband of the Bearded Woman.) 

The Ape Woman is Maria, whom Focaccia, a small-time carnival barker, discovers in the kitchen of a convent in Naples where he was showing slides of topless African natives supposedly taken during missionary work. Maria suffers from excessive body hair that makes her look ape-like, though she is perfectly human, and moments after he discovers her, Focaccia schemes to put her in a tree and sell tickets to anyone who wants to see the Ape Woman. Focaccia teaches her to walk and swing from a tree branch like an actual ape. (He appears in the act using a whip, just as Zampanó used a switch with Gelsomina in La Strada, but there the resemblance between the two films ends.) 

Marco Ferreri (1928-1997) was an Italian filmmaker of the same generation as Lina Wertmuller and Elio Petri. His best film is also the one with which he is most often associated, La Grand Bouffe, about a group of wealthy men who gather at a chateau in order to eat themselves to death. The film had a marvelous cast of Italian and French actors, but they failed to make the material less – er – unsavory. 

In his 1976 review of Ferreri’s The Last Woman, Stanley Kauffmann wrote: “His work hasn’t been free of the taint of exploitation, but it’s based in bitter satire.”(1) I haven’t heard about Fellini’s producers (including the self-same Carlo Ponti) on La Strada wanting him to film a more upbeat ending instead of the one in which Zampano learns of Gelsomina’s death, gets drunk, and ends up weeping convulsively on a deserted beach in the middle of the night. (This is, in fact, the film’s only weakness – Fellini’s imposition of a plot.) But Ponti’s insistence on a happy ending for The Ape Woman was, for the sake of the film’s satire, a much better idea than the ending Ferreri wanted. Both endings are available on a newly released DVD, and only reinforce Ponti’s choice, not Ferreri’s. (Even if Peter Bradshaw insists “It isn’t a question of one ending being better or more authentic than the other: they have to be consumed in parallel... this dual narrative gives the film a new tenderness and complexity.” Baloney. Seeing both endings proves that, occasionally, an auteur’s “vision” can be faulty.) 

Just before the film’s 79th minute, when we see the pregnant Maria on a terrace overlooking Naples, the film goes in two alternate directions. In the first, the film cuts to Maria dying in hospital, attended by doctors. Focaccia enters, sits down beside Maria, who asks him about the child (a boy, who died). He lies, telling her it is in an incubator, that he is normal and handsome. She breathes her last and Focaccia weeps. After her body is placed in a natural history museum in the name of science, Focaccia demands that her body be returned to him, since without even her dead body he can no longer make a living. The last scene shows him in his explorer gear and pith helmet (the same gear he wore in the striptease scene), half-heartedly telling a small crowd gathered around a lone carnival stage, about the body of the Ape Woman within. The camera pulls back to a wide shot of the city square with Teo Usuelli’s circus music taking us out of the film. 

In the second ending, the scene cuts to Focaccia in a hospital waiting room, fetched by a nurse who takes him to see his “normal” child. Maria is shedding her hair, even as Focaccia tells her of another possible engagement in Paris. Next we see the three of them back in the kitchen of the convent, living on charity now that Focaccia has been deprived of his livelihood. Trying to eat his sandwich in a restaurant, he is recognized by a man who shows off his family of dancing midgets. Focaccia tells him he’s no longer in show business. Focaccia accosts a doctor at the hospital, demanding reparations for his curing Maria. He gets nothing. We last see him working as a longshoreman. Maria brings him his lunch on the docks, along with their growing son. Focaccia reads Paris-Soir and tells Maria what a life they could’ve had, but she tells him she is happy. The camera pulls away as Focaccia plays with his son. Ferreri’s ending is 14 minutes long; Ponti’s is slightly less than 12. 

Annie Girardot was a familiar presence in Italian films. She married the fine Italian actor Renato Salvatore in 1965, but she had appeared in Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers in 1960. In The Ape Woman her performance is wonderfully natural. She apparently speaks her own Italian dialogue (nearly all films made in Italy were made in “the Italian manner” – with post-dubbed dialogue). She submits to Focaccia’s demands enthusiastically – and even manages to give her striptease scene an unsettling allure. Ugo Tognazzi is splendid as Focaccia, who manages to remain surprisingly human and believable, despite the otherwise creepy demands he makes of Maria. 

When The Ape Woman was shown at the Lincoln Art Theater in 1964, Bosley Crowther, the American guardian of middlebrow taste, pronounced that “The only redeeming feature of this oddly distasteful film is the fact that a certain haunting pathos does emerge from it. The director has let so much anguish and humiliation show in Miss Girardot as she grimly submits to exploitation behind a silky, brunette beard that the viewer is filled with compassion for this unfortunate girl and a creepy contempt for the rascal who so brutally uses her.” (2) Crowther was rarely right, but at least he detected the “distasteful” element in Ferreri. (Crowther saw the happy ending, yet he detected “that the censors have used their shears on this film.”) Ferreri would subsequently raise distastefulness to greater proportions. 

Peter Bradshaw, of The Guardian, wrote recently of The Ape Woman that “Maybe the time has come to see this film not as a black comic provocation, but something to put alongside Fellini’s La Strada, something intimate, a vision of uxorious poignancy.” (3) Comparing The Ape Woman (the title itself is exploitative) to La Strada is just another indication of the downward spiral of the art of film. La Strada works on different levels, part stark realism, part extravagant poetry, to explore a drama that is more than simply a brutal carnival strong man’s abuse of a simple-minded girl. For one thing, Fellini’s film is one for the ages. Ferreri’s film had its day and when the day was done it was put in cold storage. The only reason why it and so many other forgotten films are being dug up and, as I like to call it, zombiefied, is because there is, thanks to online streaming, a voracious appetite for material to be streamed, and because younger critics who are bored with classic films that are the victims of critical overkill are searching for something to “discover” for themselves and younger audiences. But if indeed “the time has come” to see Ferreri’s film as anything other than his usual crass exploitation, then I no longer believe in evolution. 

Still, The Ape Woman was named one of the “100 film italiani da salvare” – 100 Italian films to be saved. 

(1) Before My Eyes (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 215. 

(2) The New York Times, Sept 23, 1964. 

(3) “The Ape Woman review – freakshow satire with bizarre alternative-ending payoff,” The Guardian, 7 October 2021.

Memento Vitae

The days pass with a bewildering acceleration lately. They say that time flies when you’re having fun. I know that it does, but the last thing I would call what’s happening in my life right now is “fun.” Is it anticipation? 

Like everyone, I collect things. I used to collect books and vinyl records, but I lost all of them when my sister died five years ago in Anchorage. I was too far away, and too broke, to try and save any of them from the yard sale that my sister’s friends organized after her death. But they had to clear everything out of her apartment in a few days and needed money to pay for her funeral and cremation. Her ashes were scattered at a beautiful spot in Cook Inlet. 

Now I have to travel light, so I collect digital objects – pictures, documents, books, music, movies. I have an email account with an inbox that grows every day. I open every piece of mail and often notice links to articles that I mean to get back to, but I almost never do. And I ask myself what will happen to all of these things that I collect when I am gone. My sister was one of those people who put post it notes everywhere – on her makeup mirror, next to her computer screen, on her refrigerator, cupboards – wherever she was likely to look so that she would be reminded to do something, or see something, or simply to be brave or hopeful or patient enough to get her through another day. She was waiting for me to come home when she died. I didn’t make it. And it hurts every time I think of it. 

Mirroring my thoughts about what survives of a lifetime of collecting mementos was the hauntingly beautiful second part, titled “Time Passes,” of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. In Part I we are in the company of the Ramsey family in their house on the Hebridean island of Skye. It is September. The house is crowded with guests and the eight children of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey. Mrs. Ramsey is apparently happy to have so many loved persons around her, but there is a moment when she stops and seems to pivot on a point of transition, of which she is fully aware: 

It was necessary now to carry everything a step further. With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta’s arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past. 

In Part II of the novel, ten years have passed and the house is shut and forsaken. The family has been altered irrevocably – Mrs. Ramsey has died, and Andrew, one of her sons, was killed in the war (the Great War), and Prue, one of her daughters, died “in some illness connected with childbirth.” A Mrs. McNab comes occasionally to clean and keep the house from falling to utter ruin. Woolf goes into exquisite detail describing the physical condition of the house that has had no occupants for so many years: 

So with the house empty and the doors locked and the mattresses rolled round, those stray airs, advance guards of great armies, blustered in, brushed bare boards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroom or drawing-room that wholly resisted them but only hangings that flapped, wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans and china already furred, tarnished, cracked. What people had shed and left – a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes – those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. 

Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its clear image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor. So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted; solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen. Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions – ‘Will you fade? Will you perish?’ – scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain. 

Nothing it seemed could break that image, corrupt that innocence, or disturb the swaying mantle of silence which, week after week, in the empty room, wove into itself the falling cries of birds, ships hooting, the drone and hum of the fields, a dog’s bark, a man’s shout, and folded them round the house in silence. Once only a board sprang on the landing; once in the middle of the night with a roar, with a rupture, as after centuries of quiescence, a rock rends itself from the mountain and hurtles crashing into the valley, one fold of the shawl loosened and swung to and fro. Then again peace descended; and the shadow wavered; light bent to its own image in adoration on the bedroom wall; when Mrs. McNab, tearing the veil of silence with hands that had stood in the wash-tub, grinding it with boots that had crunched the shingle, came as directed to open all windows, and dust the bedrooms.* 

Virginia Woolf was perhaps predisposed by temperament to imagining such a deserted world. She makes the abandoned house in her novel seem like it’s returning to nature, absorbing the natural world outside its walls. And it isn’t at all an unhappy process. Early in the novel, Lily Briscoe and William Bankes are standing in the garden overlooking the strand: 

… both of them looked at the dunes far away, and instead of merriment felt come over them some sadness – because the thing was completed partly, and partly because distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest. 

Five years ago I published “The Deserted City” in response to the death of my sister. I was inspired to write about a Hollywood film from 1959 called The World, the Flesh and the Devil in which a man, played by Harry Belafonte, is trapped by a mine cave-in and discovers upon emerging above ground that every other human being has mysteriously vanished. Searching for signs of life, he drives all the way to New York City, only to find it, too, is emptied of people. I wrote: 

Imagine that you are living in a modern, bustling city with a population in the hundreds of thousands and you wake up one morning to discover that everyone in the city has mysteriously vanished, as if, while you were sound asleep, every single resident of the city had been vacated or evacuated for reasons that are unknown to you. 

Just before he died of tuberculosis in January 1950, George Orwell confided in a letter to a friend that he was having recurring dreams of finding himself alone in a deserted city. Fearless to the end, and without knowing that his own death was imminent, Orwell self-diagnosed the dream as a fear of death. 

I don’t dream of deserted cities, but the idea of a world bereft of people is becoming somewhat timely now that it’s impossible to deny climate change. The prospect of our extinction is being foreshadowed by the extinction of other species; insects are in decline, along with birds. Should the world outlast us, with no one around to even observe it, the Ramsey house, modeled on Virginia Woolf’s family house in Cornwall, whispers to us its consent – a world fallen silent but for the sea winds rushing to shape it and the doors and shutters creaking as they are set in motion. 

*To the Lighthouse, Part II, chapter 4.

Argument

Elizabeth Bishop died 42 years ago today of a cerebral aneurism in her apartment on Lewis Wharf, Boston. She was 68. Torn for so long between travel and dwelling, the poem "Argument" captures the depth of feeling that, I think, she found in a lifetime of not belonging. At this moment in my life, suspended, as it were, between the outpost where I have dwelled for 14 years, without ever belonging, and my home in the States, a destination I can sense is almost within reach, the poem is especially timely. 

Argument

Days that cannot bring you near
or will not,
Distance trying to appear
something more obstinate,
argue argue argue with me
endlessly
neither proving you less wanted nor less dear.

Distance: Remember all that land
beneath the plane;
that coastline
of dim beaches deep in sand
stretching indistinguishably
all the way,
all the way to where my reasons end?

Days: And think
of all those cluttered instruments,
one to a fact,
canceling each other's experience;
how they were
like some hideous calendar
"Compliments of Never & Forever, Inc."

The intimidating sound
of these voices
we must separately find
can and shall be vanquished:
Days and Distance disarrayed again
and gone…