Malle’s Phantom India makes you look at the vulture
feeding on the buffalo carcass, its featherless
fleshy neck smeared with blood, the entire screen
an image of a curved hooking beak, ripping
and gulping bits of entrails. You look away,
cover your eyes, hoping the scene will change.
When you glance again, there’s the bloated corpse
and flies and greedy inflamed eye of the buzzard
which now plunges its whole head and neck
into the the buffalo’s asshole, picking out coils of intestine.
The camera doesn’t move, the film continues to scroll.
Eventually you have to look, you’ve paid
to see this mess, but the more you look the less
distant it is—the deeper into it, the more it becomes
un-ugly, becomes just a bird feeding on body,
until you’re cleaned out, gutted, empty inside yourself,
fighting back all the those memories of her,
of being in this same theater, shoulder
to shoulder in the dark, deep into Les Enfant
du Paradis, Jules et Jim—all unreeled at last now,
the film coiling on the projection floor as you sit
in the present with your head plunged
into memories, the way love will leave you,
unspooled, the way you become your own vulture
tearing and feasting on the past.