Jerome Rothenberg and Arie Galles
'GRAFFITE,' three suites after images by Arie Galles, Part Two
[Continued from previous posting and commentary on Poems and Poetics.]
Part Two
TWENTY CLOUD POEMS
But none of them paused,
none of them wanted to be a cloud
— F. G. Lorca
cloud poem (1)
among the clouds
one face appears
a world of babes
& shadows
wrapped in its caul
cloud poem (2)
stretched out in coils
the bodies of the lost
lie dormant
babes as fair
as paradise
who sleep their dreams
so hard to lend an eye to
& to look inside
to see the earth below
more like the sky
when turning softly over
the blue above
goes grey
cloud poem (3)
inside the grey world
black eyes open
black lips
lie in wait
ready to suck down
the lights
the white
an opening more real
than morning
a limpid hole
cloud poem (4)
the dead return
the nearly dead
lie sleeping
keeping a line
between them
hungry, mutilated
faces lost
ghosts wrapped
in gauze
& set in rows
like sleepers
cloud poem (5)
land breaking through
at last at sunset
at the breaking down
& folding up
of borrowed
time
cloud poem (6)
to be a cloud
face up
against the other
brighter cloud
more like an animal
a life gone by
who would not
rather be?
cloud poem (7)
denial
where the winds rush
lifting bodies
like false clouds
from darkness
into light
& back
to darkness
cloud poem (8)
a god is easy
sighting
easy body
of a man
or woman
easy dreams
of power
from the side
where light
fades out
the face of night
is lurking
cloud poem (9)
in flying
& the fear
of flying
stars pop up
then hide
their brilliance
in the shadow
little lives
fly by
& vanish
cloud poem (10)
a wound first
or a slit
in time, in sex
a pool or lake
an island
flying past
a smaller body
& a larger
open jaws
cloud poem (11)
look down
& see
what
to the eye
are only
clouds
the earth below
forgotten
(almost)
in the mind
is only
earth
cloud poem (12)
lost habitat
through which
a fish
or snake
breaks loose
a vestige
blown across
the sea
& sky
the wish for life
nearly
unmans him
before he dies
cloud poem (13)
the lines
across the earth
escape us
at the center
where the clouds accrue
a white Dot
calld a Center (W. Blake)
cloud poem (14)
a fracture
like a mouth
a gash
in space & time
unstable
changing
mouth on mouth
cloud poem (15)
to drift away
a cloud
no longer
lighting up
the sky
in triplicates
they vanish
where the night
begins
a smearage
smeared by hand
& darkened
cloud poem (16)
to drown
& to be gone
forever
swallowed
by the tufts
of smoke
a hateful
morning
half alive
I do not want it
cloud poem (17)
beauty so great
the fear awakens
& breaks through
the lights
that should bring joy
bring terror
bodies
bumps in time
& space
all that they write
turns back on them
erased
cloud poem (18)
now dark
the fingers of
one hand
glow past their time
an alphabet of sound
before all sound
goes black condensing
colorless & cold
the ships leave harbor
in a flight
so bountiful
the night drifts by
cloud poem (19)
peninsulas like clouds
& clouds
like phantom fingers
freed from touch
the lines dissolve again
& now again
the gaps appear
like holes in time
ever anew
cloud poem (20)
the cloud as metaphor
makes me recoil
gliding above them
fearing a ledge
that will not hold
but succors me
only for now
this tender moment
vagabond
a paradise of clouds
that shrouds
the hell within* *the life within
[N.B. As part of a longer series of suites, Galles’s images here begin as black and white photographs that he then translates, as with his monumental 14 Stations, into three sets of twenty graphite drawings each, to which are added twenty poems of mine as linkages. My own procedures, after the fact, are largely improvisational, speaking to his images while maintaining a sense of distance and independence. To borrow from the medieval Japanese, the principle here is not one of direct comment or illustration but of something like juxtaposition and/or collage “wherein it does not matter that the upper and lower part are put together in a seemingly unnatural and arbitrary way so long as they cohere in the mind.” In the dance between us, it is he who leads and I who follow, hopefully always in sync.]
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