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.

Sole Readers

What histories are written in the feet? Who can read the lines? Steps through the years. The earth presses against our feet. Ancient bone runes, graveyards rising, shoes fill with dirt, with seeds that unfurl cartographies inscribed in swirls of lines, ridges and hollows that map life in calloused, toughened skin.

These animal pads.

Their
finely boned dance.

____



If you click on any image it'll take you to the album, and a larger slideshow if you so wish.

Into the bathroom I went with a large pad of paper, dark acrylic paint, a cleaned shrimp sauce container from Christmas day for water, a large brush and shouted to my daughter, 'I'm taking off my jeans, don't be embarrassed!' I laid an old dog towel and paper towels on the floor, poured some water into the tub with bubble bath creating a pool of a few inches of warm water.

I painted the soles of my feet, and stood, stomped, painted some more, took specimens, footprints, identifying etchings. The bottom of my feet were dark sepia black.

Then I scrubbed my soles clean with a sponge in the bath, watched the grey water swirl down the drain.

After I used a daylight bulb and took these photos. For the visceral, the real. Animal pads, baby!

Feet that done a bunch of walkin' through a whole crunch of years, oh yeah!

___
Written for Big Tent Poetry prompt: feet.

                                          

If I Could Write

direct link: If I Could Write

for JP

What would I write if I
                         could
                  write?

I reach over continents
                               and
                                       oceans
into the Parthenon
to find you pressing
the shutter on your camera,
the photograph
you sent.

Or ordered chaos,
                          but this is my life.

A leaf swollen with rain.
Sleeping in a hammock
in a barge with hundreds of others
on the Amazon River in Brazil.
Sun shining on metal.
How sentences
                                     fold 
                         in on each other
like white rose petals.

Days pass endless
waves in the lake.

I found her,
a spirit in the forest of the lake
in the Canadian terrain
where I fast for days.
She broke the spell.
Unexpectedly,
in the silvery leaves of the
maples standing in water.

Abandon logic for metaphor.

Speak in the tongues
                                     of the poet.
I burn the fire
on your eyelids
in my soul.

Those Ionic columns in the heat
of your Grecian photograph.

                         Mirrors
to hide behind.
My polished earrings,
necklace of reflective stones,
shirt sewn with tiny mirrors.
See yourself seeing me.

Clouds that form
a grammar of understanding
of the sky.

The wine
that sweetens your lips.
The dazzle of a sunset
the colour of
oranges.

__
Piano solo accompaniment: Roger Stéphane, 'Lointain,' from his album, Picasso, on Jamendo.

Response to Big Tent Poetry's prompt (where other entries are linked in the comments).

The recording, for some reason, took unexpected hours, and yet I feel strange including it and hope it adds to your reading of the prosepoem.

                                                        

Underground Vault

My hunger,
...........pacing.
Dark battlements
of earth and stone.

No
..........milk
of kindness
here.

In my dull stare
I watch you.

You seek a
comfort of stars
I can only imagine.

Do not praise me, fool.

The maze in which you are lost
is my lair.

_____
Words from a wordle, Big Tent Poetry's prompt (where other entries are linked in the comments):



view comments on this post here

blog banner, left, for feeds like facebook; 

 below, icon links to my webpages