United Artists Theatre, L.A.

ROBERT EASTWOOD

We stood in a line, curled from the theatre
   around the corner of Olympic,
stretched into smoggy gloam of a summer evening.
“King Kong” on the marquee—lighting promise

   as lights would dazzle from a rescuing ship.
My friend James had been here before,
had seen “Gone With The Wind” & “Rear Window,”
& now we waited in line for an old ’33 movie.

Inside’s ornate as an old castle in Spain, he said,
naked boobs in the corners. Across the street faint
   paint on bricks up fifty feet advertised cigars.
“Best on Eternity Street.” That’s what Broadway was

   long ago, James said, because it led to a cemetery.
I had then another awareness—which joined
   a string of similars that suddenly dawned on me
   at sixteen—that nothing lasts forever.

Nothing is eternity. Where that Packard sits at the curb
   was once dirt, & before that, a river,
or bed of an ocean, & cigars by the millions have been
   turned at the end of a hand into smoke.