That Riviera Touch

By George Szirtes

What terrible films we used to watch, films with their trousers
hanging round their ankles. Morecambe and Wise, do you
remember,
in Italy, in That Riviera Touch, on wooden benches, and the
laughter
breaking against something so soft and tender it was almost true;
films at the matinee with cowboys, cliff–hangers and ice cream
brought by an usherette, before we grew nostalgic about such
things.
There was no art then, none that we knew, since
it was not the film
but the entrance to the auditorium with its plush and scarlet
that drew us to the desired place where everything lived
on borrowed time, including us. They were truly terrible films,
shudders of embarrassment, reels growing a green stagy mould
that looked enticing, so we kept going to see more terrible films,
because times were almost terrible then but fell short of pain
that might be transformed into deathless dialogue, with death
like a vanishing into the ether of our terrible desires, now lost
and
laughable, turning into laughter somewhere on the riviera