Tuesday, August 09, 2011

three and a half seconds of pure light (a poem to 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 cannot ever be known

this is 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 stay
who shimmers 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; they 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 frames of dream

.


No comments: