three and a half seconds of pure light (a poem for the Time Being)

unlike the whip-pan, which is used to rip the viewer

into a tangential reality, the dead-pan uses a melting rack-focus

to engage the death-posture of the character onscreen

—Madeleine Shine

1. (he sees himself laying onward

in the rain stone 

after stone

into the mist towards a horizon

which will not be known

this the Zen-pan or stone-pan)

2. the boy the silhouette only of the boy

the long-dead seen from behind

hobbles along the alleyway

leaving his merest forensics barely

stroked into silver emulsion

3. another who reaches the vanishing point

who leaves nothing

—undiscoverable archaeology

of light

a creature of soft parts only

who dances but will not keep

who leaves no fossil for the reliquary

4. where at the table the hands work in shards

—of flint, itself fossil, compression,

the metamorphic dead—

knappings, rebuild in three dimensions

the stone jigsaws—each when finished

yet incomplete—brooding an inner hollow

where something was once eased forth

now only a void, a lost core felt

as disturbance

of the night air but nothing

when we stir

only nothing

lost there

in all our rolling fingers of dream

(2009)

.