Sometimes She Imagined She Was Judy Garland

Sometimes she imagined she was Judy Garland on a break

before the seven-hundredth take the making of A Star is Born

required – all straining to attain to the exalted status not just

of a movie but of cinema: the spin of a chaotic Warner Brothers set,

the whole of it on very nearly every day devoted to cajoling her

to gather up her nerve into performing strength, her ever-wounded

self-esteem to something that would gleam with the effect,

at least, of confidence, enough to keep her trudging  on through

the parade of movie-making’s endless days and their cacophony,

all zapped by shouted curses from the crew, to get again to yet again

inducing the conditions of conducing her to do what they all knew

she would: that moment when she could! – when effortlessly she’d

convey the certainty you’d later have in seeing it on Warner Brothers’

widest screen that she was singing it entirely to you. She wondered 

what it must be like to harbor genius you evinced at two through all

the rest of ragged life: having, like a prostitute, to tug it out on cue.

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