The same film with subtitles:
In 2009 I created My Story Is Not My Own, a metaphysical & surreal film poem concerning the Kennedy assassination. My statement concerning this project is beneath the video on the YouTube page.
There’s a breach
in the line, where the soldiers have fallen back
and my mother has fallen back on her bed too
her face out of sight, she can no longer speak.
This opening might do the trick if anyone could muster
the steps to walk through, but
we’re so exhausted, it would be a mercy
to die here and now, be done with palliative care —
Crumpled fading newsprint
As yesterday’s armies march
Into tomorrow
A future we predicted
We accepted sleep standing upright
Sleep never understood;
A chapter of blank pages: my darling, your wrist hanging
Over the bed
Your blood a confusion
Your heartbeat the black window
Swallowing my hands
Fingers forming a circle
Bottom of a fleet casting shadows across the seabed
I toss my hat overboard
from my book Hierarchy of Loss (2007) Ekstasis Editions
You among emerald drapery
from your wind-
stormed outpost
plank and plane
vertical-horizontal world pivot
sprung from coastal seed
humming core
flaking bark
woodpecker’s grail
growing a wilder carpentry
taller masonry
more commodious poem
Be in us the world’s resinous heart
hung in a spackled sky—
forest green
hoist and balance
equipoise and reach
sylvan singer song
Susan McCaslin, author of Demeter Goes Skydiving (University of Alberta Press, 2011), initiated the Han Shan Poetry Project in November of 2013, a union of the arts and activism to save an ancient rainforest in Langley, British Columbia. http://www.susanmccaslin.ca
Artist Stasja Voluti generously allowed me to reconfigure and manipulate her photographs of cedar trees and ‘things cedar’ including crows visiting cedars. To learn more about her work visit: http://talonbooks.com/meta-talon/surrealism-in-text-and-image-a-conversation
Nest and Three Eggs of Cardinal in Cedar Tree photographed by W. L. McAtee in 1905 as part of the series Birds of the Vicinity of the University of Indiana.
As if the drip of machinery oil
And of knowledge of musculature
Were enough
In the search of room after room
Coinciding with the rediscovery of sculpture
Coinciding with the sculpture of rediscovery.
Originally published in my collection Jawbone (Ekstasis Editions, 2005)
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