Stone #28

...when the light casts two shadows, and you hear footsteps within footsteps, and you realize you're following yourself...

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

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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.

Stone #27

the draft you deleted | remains an absence | in the final version || deleted images | indelible absences | in what remains

or:

the draft you deleted
remains an absence
in the final version

deleted images
indelible absences
in what remains

Stone #26

One rich, round, ripe Sardinian olive. Green, stuffed with pimento, steeped and plucked from a pot of salt, garlic and oil. Redolent.

Stone #25

sky, a grey wall of light against which trees are sculpted, fills, halftone, chiaroscuro, then the crumbling darkness

Dog Walk

I think we're going for a walk. My dog thinks we are going out to search for edible garbage.

Stone #24

snow gloss white Carrara marble word waves in vein fizzures quarry cracks flattened snowdrop the deadly chiselled delusions bootstomp

or

snow gloss  white  Carrara marble  word waves  in vein fizzures  quarry cracks  flattened snowdrop  the deadly chiselled delusions  bootstomp

or

snow gloss
          white
       Carrara marble

              word waves
       in vein fizzures
         quarry cracks

         flattened snowdrops

   the deadly chiselled delusions
bootstomp

bootstomp

(a shiny field of iced snow)