for Gordon Redding

in which William Holden plays a square-jawed war-veteran

big dumb ox, riding the rails into small-town clapperboard

America to bum a job from a Hell-we-go-a-long-way-back

College pal, whose pa owns half the prairies; and Kim Novak's

a blonde dumb broad, the clean-cut buddy's Miss America,

gorgeous girl-next-door big-date.

A dumb movie.

Didn't see it that simply those picture-palace years ago: a town

unbuttoned, pieties fingered, smugnesses stripped bare,

a caught-out spluttering aftermath; then the old (can see it now)

corny formula: wrong-side-of-the-tracks rough-and-ready nice-guy

versus country-club rich-kid; precocious younger tomboy-sister

versus doll-pretty empty-head; hazards of true love

versus apple-pie at-homes.

She bewitched, was the only thing we focused on – radical, new,

female James Dean, (that save-me-from-myself look) with the nerve

to act adolescent-vulnerable, not witlessness but the what

would become of Sylvia Plath, another blonde cookie we once saw

cycling with a basket of apples on King's Parade.

Dumb us.

Yet who can forget the scene on the jetty, reflections

of Chinese lanterns nonchalantly bobbing, that stunning sultry

‘Moonglow’ dance: Holden and Novak swaying with such

explicit passion you just knew there was another kind

of knowing, one you were then and there fumbling for

on back rows of Odeons, another American dream to pack

your bags for and follow hopelessly into the brave Blue Beyond.