Sex in ’32—The Pre-Code Poem *
–For Susan Hayden
They are Uncertain Times but this much is certain:
When a show opens on a shot of a “Professor Bramann,”
(from the Institute of Electrical Research) bragging
to the tuxedoed staff of the most luxurious retailer of jewels
and jewelry in all Vienna, how this new alarm system
generates an invisible ray that leaps from mirror
to mirror, the most burglar-proof system ever devised
by modern science, they know—those movie-goers—
that joint is about to get robbed.
And when the bored and beautiful Baroness lingers
nearby in the salon for bored wives, while in the gallery,
her new husband—new but old—seals the deal
on what she wants now, not just any diamond,
a famous one, while she’s trying to shake off that petulant
rich boy lover she never loved, who reproaches her,
Why didn’t you meet me at Pelham’s for tea!?—they know
that dame is about to fall for a jewel thief.
Of course, it helps when the thief’s played by debonair
William Powell and she is dark, striking, Kay Francis.
And he does, after all, rob with such calm elegance.
If I’d known you were going to be here,
I’d have allowed more time for this robbery, is always
a good line, if delivered with the proper panache
while gazing into the eyes of a woman
who, suddenly, doesn’t mind being robbed.
So, from here on out it’ll be ermine coats flowing
like white cream, bathtubs of lavender suds piled
like wealth up to the naked shoulders. Because outside
and down the block, men line up for “Hoover Stew”
—macaroni, hot dogs chopped, boiled tomatoes
and canned corn out of a big pot.
Shamed men, heads down, hoping not to be recognized.
Wives try to stretch spuds and sausage into a meal for five.
Sex. What’ll that get you but another kid. This is sex now,
the cry of the baroness,
Sapphires! My first love!
They are not thieves, these ones who put in years of honest
days’ work, who saved, saved, and it came
to this, to nothing. Yet an erotic, thieving mood drifts in the air—
to be stolen from, to steal back—like a trace
of some opiate on the wind, in the still room, crowded, rows
of strangers in the dark—a hot, uncensored, pre-Code
desire, to feel dizzy like this…
I want to see what you stole in Paris, Rome, London!
Why, we’re just like her, even now! No…
not like her, more like them—the audience—
you know? Lovers of movies, stories, lovers
of other lives.
I want to play with these the way a child plays in sand!
To try them on…
The way she sinks her hands into the jewel thief’s black
case, velvet sparking with light,
with lightning, chilled, burnt,
invisible,
and brings them up dripping, garlands, globular strands—
…to pour them all over me!
To bury myself in them…
.
*The Motion Picture Production Code, AKA, the Hays Code, implemented in 1934, involved a series of “Don’ts or Be Carefuls” which limited the content of movies with regards to sexual suggestiveness, attitudes around criminal activity, and other subjects. It sprang from the conviction that movies should support “the correct standards of life.”
Movies pre-1934 are sometimes referred to as “Pre-Code.”
© Suzanne Lummis
Suzanne Lummis‘ fourth collection, Crime Wave, will be published in 2025 by Giant Claw/What Books—recent poems in Catamaran, Plume, Anacapa Review, earlier ones in Ploughshares, The New Yorker, The Antioch Review. She is the editor of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series, imprint of Beyond Baroque Books, and editor of the anthology forthcoming in 2025, Poetry Goes to the Movies.
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