3. The stillness of waiting is broken only
when a sunstruck actor, encased in his tin
shell of armor, clattered to the ground
sweat oiling the skin from underneath the thin
film of Vaseline applied to simulate sweat.
The budget swelled like dropsy.
4. Excess without wisdom. And yet
the public loved to hear about the real
love that flared on the world's
stage between the long-adored actress
(from the ingenue's "pre-erotic sentience")
and the upstart mecurical Welshman.
5. Love isn't a bad way to go when the cells of
the body politic are still
stunned by a regicide in which the victim
had no time to display
Cleopatra's uncommon courage .. . and
fix
one serene final gaze on the reeling globe.
6. (Horace could not force the future
to listen when he warned:
wind
shakes the tallest pine, lightning
strikes the highest tower .
. . ).
7. Why finish the film, why get out
of the characters whose passion,
mythic, wild, unbugeted,
rivaled their own
when they could go on
falling forever in the
/
