you are a strong man
now a wobbly puppet
betrayed
by some compound of fear
your friend
still sober
marches behind
brandishing
three items in silver
a trumpet
and two candlesticks
which will soon be tossed
into the furnace of addiction.
Old Mrs Anyone
Widow
you at least
were willing to allow
my hysterical release
kneeling down
crushing the flowers
dirt in my fist
i saw you saw
the amethyst
tepid on my breast
the wedding stone
which would atone
for my recklessness
but of all men
I loved him best
who lies in ashes
which now I pour
on my head
over me for him
in the precipice
between
the living
and dead upon
our memorial bed
Saturn
The satellites were those that would hunt down Saturn, but were found out by him and as punishment the king ensnared the hunters into orbits at distances according to the point each hunter had reached in their approach to the king. Saturn decreed that these orbits not be circular but elliptical, so sentencing the hunters to an eternal re-enactment of their failed hunt. But Saturn in his benevolence also decreed that each of the respective orbits of the hunters not be everlasting, but that they should gradually disintegrate, so that at the end of time, his own death would eventually come. Ignorant of this final reprieve, the hunters in their respective solitudes underwent countless approaches towards the king, their orbits at times bringing them close enough as to be almost able to slay him, only then to be taken back again to the farthest distance from their target. On the surface of these satellites was it any wonder that their oceans froze or volcanoes raged or their atmosphere escaped ? These were the states of the hunters, unaware that one day, they would be brought close enough to slay the one they once followed and with this killing be engulfed in the fires of the dead king.
The Attic Which is Desire
There exists a curious analogue between the works of Stan Brakhage and William Carlos Williams. Brakhage and Williams are literalist, they present shots or words not always for their analogous, metaphoric content but often only for their physical (colour, rhythm, pattern) impression. Brakhage will often cut a shot just at the moment it starts to imply narrative, elide a rhythm if it grows persuasive. In a film like The Act Of Seeing with One's Own Eyes , an autopsy is filmed in 16mm colour bearing a tonal resemblance to Chardin's paintings of skates or Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp: the examination of bodies is the discovery of colour, shape and rhythm in a field of content which we don't normally equate with beauty. An autopsy may be expected to be read as droll and clinical, perhaps gruesome and unsettling, Brakhage attains some kind of strange autumnal koan. By filming these bodies he is performing an autopsy of his own. He refuses genre or accustomed meaning. There are no scenes and if there are, these are poetic modules presented for contextual emphasis, not as units of a theatrical narrative. Williams, in the same vein as Ezra Pound's Cantos, employs words in the manner of Cubist collage. For example, Williams' poem The Attic Which Is Desire, the description of an illuminated sign advertising SODA projecting an alternating pattern of light and darkness onto the rafters of an attic room. The soda sign is presented on the page thus:
* * *
* S *
* O *
* D *
* A *
* * *
This motif is placed within poetic time (the poem still has a meter and a form, despite these being suggestive or provisional) where it is tested as new content for poetry. Brakhage too, in films like Mothlight, adheres the actual wings of moths and vegetation to celluloid. In projection, the film's flickering light is reminiscent of moths swarming a light source at night : the throw of the projector bulb (the films of Brakhage are not well served by video) pierces the variegated apertures formed by the spaces between the glued wings of moth and foliage on the surface of the film. Here analogy is conveyed through techne, as opposed to the literary play of filmed language or poesis. The work of the hands (techne) presides over the creation of a new poetic of forms, because it able to apprehend, beyond craft, a largely unconscious, unintellectual field of use which is almost sub language, being closer to instinctive impulse as opposed to cultural form. The cinema of Brakhage is the phenomenology of seeing.