More on: poetry

The Piano, Jane Campion (1993) May it be as it was in our rhapsodies. Tethered to you, oneiric assemblage of sea salt ivory: you playing me as I imagine the gods have, cavorting on their mountain of stone. Forgive me. This our default condition: each of us versions of the other’s own making. Call me…

      The Piano, Jane Campion (1993) This, the ocean’s rustled babble— was it the first sound the first woman heard as she was cut out of another body’s desire, wet and sand-soaked as a shell pried out from the shore? How could it not have been thus— like now with you, expected one, shuttered in,…

Paul Mazursky, director (1982) Kalibanos welcomes you to his comfy cave, and if the Sony Trinitron proves defective so too does the illusion that you had slipped free from the world and its ubiquitous corruptions, that you could simply say you would no longer play the soul-eroding role of mute, complicit slave. Many frames will…

La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini (1960) In a frame or two, Marcello will turn away, finally having failed to hear her voice, the angelic girl beckoning from across the estuary’s rift in the beach, etching in the sand the divide between his world and her world. Behind him, in that flat expanse to which he…

Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely God is present in this place, and I did not know it!” Shaken, he said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven.”                      …

What! Did the Hand then of the Potter shake?                             —Rubaiyat The kick wheel turns against the spondees of her feet —clop-clop—upon the floor: amorphous clay shines like a seal’s skin. We are uncarved blocks, says the Tao. Hum-hum, says the wheel. And I am Yahweh at dust, she says, her hands tucked and carving…

after Washington Allston Growing up, the coke ovens were open ears I uttered nothing to. Men labored here to impress themselves into the landscape, now rust & snake pits, the tang of copper in Dunlap Creek. Each night the ATV engines protest the approaching evening’s indifference. Its stormy immanence. In this desert, I scoured books,…

A lost man might pour his jug onto the sand to feel one with the desert, and for that moment he is cleansed of heat and thirst. But freedom is not a moment’s craft. Pinned by memory, he will regret the gesture and the surrender. The sullen break of journey onto knees will not console…

What but poverty earned him your respect that when our fates were turned he is called to act as cruelly as I did then? Lot’s wife turned back in shock, in pity perhaps, and for this she was robbed of flesh and name. Why plant in us the startle and curious glance to countermand that…

My beloved son, I received your letter where you spoke to me like an adult told me all about how hard you studied at school and where I saw that your passion for learning chased all the darkness and ugliness away as you delved into the secrets of the big book of life You’re confident…