#037 - Longlegs (2024)
Hello and welcome to my web log. Last night I saw Longlegs (2024).
Sometimes a poem is just a list of grievances. I have a sunburn across the front of my chest and the top of my shoulders. It’s a keepsake from a day spent on a boat on a lake with about a dozen dear friends this past weekend. Each time I change my posture slightly and the yoke of my shirt rakes across the lobster skin of my shoulders, I remember the first cave we found. It was a little wave-formed hollow in a dihedral in a limestone cliff band. We swam into it. It opened up into a little room that about four of us could fit in at a time if one person climbed up and stood on a narrow ledge while the other three swam. Or I remember one of the first coves we stopped and hung out in, where we parked the rental pontoon boat and most of us swam around or floated on inner tubes, brainstorming about how to become lake pirates and live out there forever, raiding the nicer boats for provisions. The biggest dragonfly I think I have ever seen landed on my chest half a dozen times while I floated out there and this may have been where I got my sunburn. One of our friends who stayed on the boat, who is a herpetologist, offered snacks to those of us in the water and then said that we reminded him of turtles as we all slowly swam towards the boat together to get them. The water was a surreal blue-green color and so warm that we could have stayed in all day. Or the sunburn makes me remember the second cave we found, a dark spot we spied in the trees that we swam out to and scrambled through poison ivy to get to the mouth of. We foolhardily explored the first few hundred feet of the cave by only the light of Andreas’s cellphone. We stopped in a low room and hummed, harmonizing in the dark with the cellphone light off. After about twenty minutes or maybe half an hour, one of the people who stayed behind with the boat came looking for us.
In grad school, I worked as a museum guard and one of my coworkers, Jim, had been in the Navy about thirty years earlier. One day, during our shift, he gave me his old white sailor’s hat because I reminded him of Bob Denver’s Gilligan and also because none of his kids wanted it. I wore it the whole time we were on the boat, popped inside out like Gilligan would have. That and a pearl-snap denim shirt that I’d rip off one-handed every time I was about to get back in the water and the floral board shorts that are still slightly stained from the red clay mud from an obstacle race I ran with my brother and sister-in-law five or six years ago.
At some point I realized that I could open the door on the bow and lie down and stick my face right above the water as we were hauling ass across the lake. As we were dashing back to the marina in the late afternoon, I spent several minutes approximating some large fishing bird gliding effortlessly just above the surface of the water. I have been trying to be more adventurous, and in many ways I have been here recently, but I did not jump off the big rope swing that a few of my friends went on and I am okay with that decision.
Longlegs was a fine film that seemed like it did the things it set out to do but the main thing I want to tell you is that if you get like a dozen people and all go in on it together, you can rent a pontoon boat for an entire day for like thirty, thirty-five bucks a person. My darling friends brought sandwiches, fruit, biscuits, cake, pie, and just about every other delight you can imagine. My friend Jenn and I were floating in tubes near the shore at one point, away from everyone else, because Jenn had found about eight of the biggest butterflies I had ever seen. They were huddled together tightly on the bank a few feet from us. Fish occasionally swam up and nibbled on my low back; this may also have been when I got my sunburn. The butterflies were either pissing or laying eggs depending on which of our accounts you believe but I won’t tell you which of us held which position. From the boat, maybe fifty yards away, I could just barely make out Riley announcing that Biden had dropped out. A few minutes later, a pair of turtles swam right by us. Sometimes you have to couch your blessings as grievances lest your audience begrudge you from the jump.