satori machines
Elisa and I wrote some poetry and read it along with Daron Muller and Eleni Sikelianos and quite a few others at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art last week. The idea was to write poetry based on the non-narrative films. The picture above makes it seem as though Elisa and I were the only ones there. She and I wandering the gallery and reading to each other would have been another kind of night — a better kind? — but I was pretty honored to be included and so I wrote a poem for the first time in a few moons. (Imagine every second line indented 3 or 4 spaces … the formatting on WordPress murders me)
Channel
after an instillation by David Fodel and Paco Proano
You are a lie of light;
be indeterminate,
a satori machine
who makes gods of geegaws.
The glass harmonica
is pitched to obscure
the rattle of teacups
ten feet away.
Make your smoky poly-
carbonate a spiritual
filter for what hovers
in back of you.
Don’t worry patterns,
they convert at a touch
not your touch. The picture
remains translucent,
i.e. unclear.
Kick the stone of your
soul down the road:
advance the track.
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about 5 years ago
I like this photo. No faces (yours is out of focus), a camera screen presumably video-recording the event, an anonymous space with an enormous window that’s closed. Or is that a screen? And tho we can’t see her face, Elisa is holding / raising her cup to her mouth, and action we catch just over her shoulder.
The first line, “You are a lie of light” appeals for its alliteration and the double meaning of lie–and it’s just unusual enough to lure the reader. “is pitched to obscure” and “Don’t worry patterns” are similarly successful. [I reassured, “Don’t worry, patterns.”]
You really ought to be writing poems. Maybe in the margins of your novel drafts.