dance/ ...indigo folio leaves

direct link: dance/ ...indigo folio leaves

Folio: a sheet of paper folded once to make two leaves of a book or manuscript.

Late afternoon, when the spring sun was pouring in, I videotaped some dancing to José Travieso's track, 'Monster,' on his album, "No More Faith":  Besides being technically beautiful, quite goth baroque in its composition, there is an undercurrent of feeling in this music. Music like this can awaken the inner self in its dance, or this is how it calls to me.

And I layered two different dances to the same music: first I separated the figures, but it didn't look quite right, so I superimposed them, allowing the dance of the two to occur in the same space, an intertexuality of subjectivities, like folio leaves.

I see the woman of the dance transformed into figures that are, but are not me.



I wrote to the Spanish musician, José, on his track, 'Monster': 'This piece is so beautiful, like the passion of angels, pain and transcendance in the music that you play, what is the monster? Is beauty the monster?

How can beauty be a monster?'

He teaches all day, and at night, the music. Stressful, hard. He rarely has time to read, walk, visit friends, relax. "Everyday I work on it with passion... or maybe just obsession. So, everyday, when I'm recording an album, I feel more and more tired, it consumes me... Music is my own monster, my search for the perfection and the beautiful thing is my own monster. This is my explanation."

'I understand. A consuming passion. A beauty that devours its creator in consummation.

I, too, prefer art that is vulnerable, without pretence.'



[still working on this prose poem]

Music

...enters your backbone, joints, plucks the
cartilage holding you together. Music is the
moon of the red tides of your bloodstream.
Drift to and fro, a willow tree, or sway, bend,
a flamenco, stretch, purple morning glories
on the vine, jump. Centre in your hips, your
delta of fiery flow. Feel your pain, power, joy.
Express yourself, woman. No-one is watching.
Say it all. The lyric travels tenderly through your
wrist, a memory of the wind on the hill. Be the
hands that play you. You are an instrument of the
instruments of the musician who is blind, absent,
gone. Whose music plays on; who does not know
you exist. Orphean muse. Twirl on the floor, the
beat in your ankles, room spinning, see through
the canvas walls, stars, sun, moon luminous
on the clock turning. Give everything.

Wanton woman. Harlot of the night. Mother of
angels. Insufferable radiance. Black hole of
emptiness. Sweet moan nectar.

Be loose as a cigarette on the lip in Rio de Janeiro.
The ruffle on a lacy skirt in Dusseldorf. Like the
ruins of the Colosseum in Rome. Glide as
diamonds on the Aegean Sea. Icy tundra of the
Arctic. Emerge and submerge a dorsal fin in the
Caribbean. Become a stone age myth, a magic
amulet hewn from rock. Goddess of the Oroborus
serpent, undulate your liquid bones. Mystery dangles
like your silver bracelets, the ghosts are present.
Approach yourself by disappearing. Rhumba to
this moment; tango to the other side. Primavera of
being. Beautiful in your sensuality. Seek invisible
illumination in your writhing steps. Flee time,
transform in your multiplicity, a seer searching
the spheres. Manifest your wishes - your dreams.
Shake them out of the air to materialize like light forms.
Shimmy, wet sweat, a flag in a wind storm. Thunder
the floor. Cross mid-section through a Pythagorean
theorem and come out the other end of Leibniz's prisms.
Play on Goethe's colour wheel. Trip like a stream
dashing over rocks as smoothly as a Shakespearean
sonnet's sexual ambiguity. Witch, werewolf, Goth
beauty, fragile starchild, cyberpunk, pull the sky
down. Sway those hips, woman. Sway them until you
ignite. Be you while you dance; don't let them
touch you. Dance with your ineffable
muse. Just, dance.

I pull purple veils over my eyes, in love with
indigo blue silk lights and shadows.

I dance the white and black keys of a harpsichord
while it dances me.

Listen: dance on the stage of your
imagination.


© by Brenda Clews, 2011 (a sort of inspirational poem for women, but there's a lot going on in it, too)

            


___
If you're fascinated by the way videos evolve through versions, there are two earlier versions at a Picasa album: The Canvas Backdrop

I've entered this poem in the Big Tent Poetry's Ring of weekly poems. 'dance, ...indigo folio leaves' is a performance piece that includes video and poetry. One, a poetry of motion; the other a written poem. They are on the subject of dancing, and the poem is still being drafted.

                                          

Photographer of White Clay

Your clay-whitened bodies covered with cracks like dry riverbeds on the surface of the moon.

Cracked and dry as a desert. Denuded of identity, warmth, flush skin tones. No bright highlights, no glamour. Bodies risen from clay pools, an earthen pottery.

No colour, erase difference. Frozen white ghosts on the edge of time, a sea of pale mud, a genesis.

You are Adam and Eve, the beginning of all beginnings, or the end of all endings. Face each other, relinquish your loneliness.

Your skin hardened like living statues in a dissolving Garden of Eden, the smeared powdered rock, breathing clay, imprisoned in your own beauty.

Or Butoh dancers, the anguish of the bomb that whitens into ash,
pain rising as dying reeds sway in the blackened river,
encase yourselves with white wet dust,
obliterate yourselves

In it, roll in it, emotion, explosive,
hidden in those primal masks,
naked in your ghostly forms,
raw spirits rising.

Pass beyond the eye
of my camera

To the dark side of the moon.

Sink into your bodies,
into each other.




(background music, a tiny section of 'Bodydrama at The Nave,' by ARTSomerville)

Statues in Profile (photograph will open in a new tab)

photo by Marko Kulik

-

In response to a Big Tent poetry prompt: Write a poem about a portrait photograph that you did not take yourself: "The strategy this week is that you will imagine the photographer and write about the subject as if from the point of view of the photographer."

As a photographer, I am a director of the shot as I describe the poetry of the scene to the actors so that they can become what I am looking for.

See here for the prompt and links to the other poems.

Ink Ocean

I don't expect anyone to actually like this, but it should read interestingly. My last cut on my upcoming poetry album. In process, still to be finished, recorded, and so on.

[When I write, I am a wreck. Wonder if this long piece written thru interspersed months will pull together? I read aloud; crawl into a ball; write with my shaking bones.]

Ink Ocean


In the burning ocean. Where plumes drag through the world's gloom. Swoop of feathers, 

tarred. Or metal wings of dispersants. Gloss the rocks. You can't know where we go at 

night. Or why the morning shines. Or the glimmer of gold before sunset. Relentless tidal 

cycles. Let me tear at the crests and troughs. Go in. GO IN. Shiver. Sin. Dark water, grey 

clouds. A rain of black in falls from the sky. Drips. Rips, slashes the wet heaving page. 

Heat of sandpaper on fire. Burn the slick, salt water on fire. Coral crevices to hide. 

Grottos like vowels. That invite. Come in, why don't you. Open. Open. Open. Arms 

reach up. Seeds rain down. Wash the foam. Pray forests. Burning despair of illusion. 

Fruit of veils to burn in. Salt washes open eyes. Deltas fog. They said GO IN.
.

In the night, I covered the words. Ink sheets. Sheets of the net of ink. Even I couldn't 

read them anymore. I forgot the words, or they forgot me. Or I had to make them up 

when you asked. They washed up from the black ocean, those words. Spun out of black 

thread with black foam on a wave darkly. Ocean of words lapping on the beach,
reckoning.
.

Love isn't a silky bliss mist, more like the suture we sew our wounds with. The bloodied 

scapula-feathers of angels.
.

Language summons us to speak.

Speaking cascades from depths
like wells of water overflowing.

Water eats away at order, rivers
erode their banks, deltas silt.

Our words silt in the paddies
of time, flooded with being.
.

...the ocean
tempests, salt
waves seep
from the rug
under my feet...
.
This strange sea birdsong on love.
.
Coded words. Words that conceal what they reveal, that hide their message in plain sight. 

Invisible essence of the world. We are seeing what is invisible. The falling butterflies. 

Our hands full of snow. Or white feathers in the heat. What do we hide behind? What 

can we not forget? The way we perceive the lives we live are our realities.
Don't make it up.

When I lift the lip, water drops of me, my desk, the paper.

                                    The salt burns.
.

We could be stars burning through the night
     or phosphorescent fish glowing without starlight in the deep.

I am a fisherman of words, dragging my nets through your oceans, trawling your schools 
of lexicons.
.

Love is the twine that binds our bones together.

Let the cold water fill our eyes until we swim in vision every night.

Oil swirls, coating.
.

Under sheets of sea in the frozen Atlantic we found each other.

     You came in me like a wave of love.

          My heart dances crill.

Whalesong of life.

     Salt falls from feathers under this pen writing its words on the dark side of the moon 
in the abandoned ocean beds.


Wet, heaving page.

     Ink sheets.


Love is an aorta. A pounding surf of consonants like blood cells in the syrum falling from
rising wings.


It's a clash of shell, bone, hunger, physics, troughs and crests, blinding moments, the 
sight of psychics.


     Into. The explosion of who we are.
               Our oily words. Crashing waters.
          Choking the river streams. Fish bulging, dying.
     We eat the world.

We go out each night and net the catch. Clean up the mess. Retain memories. Under
our gold skin, arms flap like wings of waves.
.

Let me flow over you while you drown me.

     ...in your love. in your love. in your love...
.


The dream of us opens.

I fold the ocean over my head. Spy on our dreams. Within dreams we liquify. We are gone 

at night. Wings of sand on fire. The lovers' grotto, held together with crab claws, filament 

of gold feather shafts. Gilded ink. Love wakes
you every day. Into
your
   body, body
      of words. 

Seeping, lines of tar on the sands. 
Crumple the paper of wind.


Find darkness; bring it in. IN.


          An opencast poem, working from the exposed surface.

          Taking images from what appears.
.

we anchor in the swells.

we are sky, sun, moon, stars, wet kisses of wind, sailing birds, flying fish, glittering ocean


                    we are nothing


we will wash away
drops in the ocean
without memory

nets of words
dissolving

 knowing 
this strange song of 
love loves
through us...

love loves
through us...

love loves
through us...
 

                                          

Salt of the Sea

direct link: Salt of the Sea.
Livio Amato's, 'Dream Opening,' from his album, "Sensitivity"


Salt of the Sea

             She said seawards-
            "Salt in the seas
            like the blood in tears, 
         a forced forment of waves: 
         our cries, rushed into 
         life, and death,
         a barge that carries
         souls to the other side
               of nowhere."

The moon slides
into a shell
conch, cone, harp, volva
      that hears
      our whisperings-
            breeze, seafoam.

This season of weathered wood, amniotic
scent.

Inner forces drive the ocean.

Mystery emerges and recedes like waves
opening dreams.

Osprey and clouds sail high over surf.

      Print the soul in the flag to fray. 
Rocks rubbing in water become sand.
Wet sand under the pincers of crabs who burrow.
The warp and weave of the ocean slapping
            at our consciousnesses.

You came, on a minion of steel, the noise
of condensed crowds. Like an engine 
of grief. Imprinted with caustic 
wax winds. Ripe as a
salt flower.

With blue love on your lips
the colour of seaspray.

           ≈

The sea drops its showers
of diamonds on our skin.

We waited for each other
in the violins
of wind.

The water
thick with history.

I placed my heart
in your stone
chest.

A wave gives to another wave
its white wedding foam.

Here in the depths of understanding
among the seahorses and anemones,
graves, lovers, sunken dreams,
buried treasures.


       "Love, love until the night 
        falls swiftly."
                Pablo Neruda

(I took this photo in North Vancouver, 2003)

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