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At the Imax
watching one of those 3D movies
surrounding and overwhelming
lions jumping out, lost cities,
dark knights, underwater grottoes,
planetviews from space; when intruding
a smell of buttered popcorn triggers other
memories: buttered toast, Seville marmalade
taste bud wings transporting me to size six
where outside it’s snowing in overcoat land
while here coals glow in a grate reddened
by poker and tongs
a cardboard box is open on the carpet
its stack of double sepia cards, glossy
left-right almost identical twins exposed,
on closer look tiny differences appear
almost imperceptible between tea stains and
cigarette burns, but most of all I remember
the wondrous contraption of wood, brass
and glass, with clips you fitted them into
then clasping the whole thing close
to eyes and nose, sliding them along a track
when inner worlds appear jumping out and
I’m inside the scenes again: a man on
a camel besides a sphinx, cliffs next to
a stormy sea, birds on a telegraph
wire, a steaming locomotive, dinosaur skeletons,
the camel man again, wait—
isn’t that father, all khakied up, his
mustaches bristling as if by some internal
switch that Imax never invented, here he
is again at breakfast table cracking open
his boiled egg while mother, bright eyed,
brings in mounds of buttered toast, hot
chocolate, all so clear and three dimensional
in the darkness here in Imax, I can smell
her face cream as she kisses my cheek and
as I look around just one momentary blink
for a tissue, I find a box of popcorn on my
lap and blazing stereophonic music all around
© Johnmichael Simon
2014
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