Charmed, I’m Sure
By Robert Estes
July 15, 2024
July 15, 2024
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How would sudden certainty feel?
Strange notions—fate and romance —claimed my early mind in a prophetic nighttime vision. I was only single-digit young. My family never went to drive-in movies, but I did one time with neighbors—can’t remember which, just know it was a carful, a treat with that family’s kids. I remember getting out of the car, maybe sitting on a front fender or the hood, walking around a little through the cars. It was all strange to me. I was a little uneasy. The movie was on the big screen, black and white. A crowded room, sophisticates’ mix: Some Enchanted Evening was sung. Was that my first encounter with the word “enchanted”? The scene with that song had a strong effect on me. My grownup destiny had been revealed: a woman seen across a crowded room, whose laughter would enthrall me some evening many years in the future. I would know even then that somehow I’d see her, hear her again and again: her laughter strangely essential, since its sound would sing in my dreams. Everything about that night was novel—the outdoor movie and the song—and so stuck with me. I can almost picture the scene: the woman across the room laughing in black and white on the big screen outdoors in the night, rightly obscure. I viewed it as a promise, the best that grown men could expect. When would it come? Many years later I learned that the song was from the famous musical, South Pacific. I tried to make that fit with the scene that haunted me, but really I could not. I never gave up wanting to identify that crucial film. Now we can find out anything online. The movie version of South Pacific was in color, not out when I was a kid. It had to be another one. So I kept searching, found out everything about that song. The movie I saw at the drive-in does not exist. The song was in the air and spawned a dream, I must suppose. But why? It magnified the power and the glamour of the song. Is this the only time the memory of a childhood dream has lived for decades as of a waking-state event? How am I to know? This one I discovered, had no suspicion (in this case). Sometimes I revisit places only seen in Dreamland, which is real for me, in that funny sense. I want to go back to that drive-in, get a better look, but it’s out of my control, in the hands of Fate—just as all the women I ever loved laughed often and well. |
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Robert Estes, who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, got his Physics PhD at UC Berkeley and had some interesting times using physics, notably on a couple of US-Italian Space Shuttle missions. Since then, 30-odd of his poems have appeared in 20-odd publications, including Cola Literary Review, The Moth, Gargoyle Magazine, the museum of americana, Alba: A Journal of Short Poetry, Constellations, Sierra Nevada Review, and the anthology Moving Images: Poetry Inspired by Film.
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Author’s Note:
I don’t want to have this be a “spoiler,” so I’ll just say the poem is true, but that writing it gave me a chance to think more about an old nebulous event and to wonder how important it might have been to my psychic development.