Chaplin

Jeanne Murray Walker

Maybe suffering is always like this,
black and white and silent
as the little man pacing his jail cell,
his suit suddenly grown too tight,
his hands gripping the cold bars
while he cranes his neck to see whether
the beautiful woman still waits for him
by the set table in their shack.
There is no jailer, that’s how it is,
or else the jailer gives him a look
as if to say you put yourself in here
Buster, now find your own way out.

His sorrow grows longer, long enough
to strike the walls like a match
and ignite the movie if he weren’t such
a funny crumsuck of a man, no
Robert Redford, more like a heart on legs.
When we see a close-up of the girl,
her pointy lips and white catastrophic face,
we guess that she won’t spring him
and, even with all our longing, we can’t,

we, who have barely escaped oblivion,
the sound of civilization shutting
behind us like iron gates, held open briefly
by technicians who switched this
crippled film to video tape

so we can watch Chaplin the way we might
listen to a dead lover’s voice, his last
breezy message on the answering machine,
slowing the words down to dwell on
every grainy vowel, subtracting
everything else till all meaning leaps
from these few sentences, the way it’s possible
to narrow suffering down to a deadpan
black and white cell.

And then
as redemption can happen, it does,
the jailer changes his mind, the door
swings open and the dazed man walks free.
We see a long shot of him toddling toward
the girl, his bow legs scissoring the air, his feet
turned out, his jaunty black head bobbing.
It is as if sound and color has kicked in.
You can almost hear white petals falling
from every apple tree he passes,
drifting across the brilliant purple sky.

Visit Jeanne Murray Walker as Image Artist of the Month for February 2000

Issue #20 • Summer 1998