On my smart TV I find Jules et Jim
and watch it again after all this time,
remembering when Verona and I
saw all the New Wave movies from France.
There had never been anything like them.
We were both in love with Alain Delon.
Though The Seventh Seal from Sweden was
what utterly blew our minds. (Nothing else
did; we were probably the last generation
so innocent of drugs.) We were living in Carlton,
I was a student. There was only one university
in Melbourne then. The cinema was next to
the pawn shop; we were customers of both.
We became best friends: discovering and loving
words and art together. We were sharing
a rented house. She painted a mural
on her bedroom wall – one that could be
washed off when we left. I failed French and
switched to Philosophy. (English Lit was always
a given.) Germaine Greer was on stage at the Union
Theatre. We called it the Onion. Germaine could
sing, dance, act and be funny, the lot. It was before
she wrote her book. She had purple hair, long
purple nails, legs that went on forever, and
a voice husky from cigarettes. We all smoked.
Everything altered with the long vacation
when I went home to Tassie and we couldn’t
keep renting the house. But it took a few more years
and many life changes before that idyllic friendship
soured. We were grown by then, mothers by then.
I was already divorced the first time. Verona was
widowed. I never saw her again after 1967, although
I know vaguely what became of her (the grapevine).
Like me, she contrived a life which she’s still living.
We only watched those movies once; they burned
into the brain forever after. But now I’d like to go back,
revisit the young Delon, wish once more for a mouth
like Jeanne Moreau’s, and still be so blazingly clear
that Art is the whole meaning and purpose of life.
For Friday Writings #99: Why??? at Poets and Storytellers United, I'm asking people to entitle a piece 'Why—?' fill in the blank, and write to our title. As you see, my own title question is still somewhat unfinished, but I trust the poem will clarify.
