Whipsmart bombshell, polymath
queen,
brains and beauty, beauty and pains
projected
on the silver but slanted screen.
You
parted your black ocean down the middle,
and
even Pharaoh wouldn’t cross so pure a line.
Maybe
Byron or da Vinci would have some luck
scoring
neon pinball tricks in your brain—
pickup
poems with a Mona Lisa smile—
while
dancing the rest of your bones on the Seine.
You
always walked in beauty like the night,
a
speaker of truth, an ear for the blind,
Dylan’s
sad-eyed lady of the lowlands,
mystical
artist, scientific find.
You
frequency-hopped around a life well-lived,
inventing
and acting and making love to the band,
and
yet no one tossed a penny into your busker’s sieve.
The
feds grabbed your patent for radar and chips,
but
you played it close to the vest with lips
that
kissed the juice from Hollywood and Vine—
you—fruit
of all fruit, Eden’s divine.
Hedy,
I love you, prophet and seer.
You
were a thousand years ahead of your time
a
thousand behind.
There’s
no one who could touch you then,
few
today who can hear your rhyme.
I
wish I were Byron, da Vinci, or Bob.
We’d
have a meeting of minds over Pharaoh’s divide.
That
would be enough for me and for now.
Let
it be, let it be, this Viennese waltz.
It
will be our secret, you lyrical bride.
~William Hammett
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