a first kiss

A First Kiss

She had always wondered, ever since she first paddled to the middle of the lake towards the end of summer in her third year of vacation here, how many bodies the police have had to pull from this particular lake. The hazy quality of light had always raised in her a certain melancholy, an introspective awareness of not just her own mortality, and it was no different then, set adrift as she was on an ancient, sturdy wooden raft in what was roughly the center of the lake, nothing but that raft and her hands and a battered copy of "The Weary Blues" and the crust of a peanut-butter and raspberry jam sandwich to keep her company.

People in this mindset, she had read, often felt a certain compulsion to organize, to make orderly, to straighten, to tidy up. She had always been the sort to make the best of what she had, and so she aligned the crusts with the slants of the topmost layer of wood, laid the book open in perfectly-squared orientation at the center of the raft, which, when she settled again, resembled a floating altar, Arthur's place of meeting with his Lady of the Lake. Her own place of remembrance for those she imagined had died here.

The copse at the shore over her shoulder stood its silent watch, cloaked in the early morning fog and mist which had settled around the stoic wardens. She knew it must be lonely, guarding this lake for the half-century or more that the trees had grown in their inexorable upward climb. She felt something like that, that she had grown amongst a pack of others growing just the same, but that she was ever apart, that she was as thickly-skinned as the oaks lining the shore. Their roots drank from the soil goblet, constantly draining the ever-replenished vessel. She felt that craving. She was empty, parched. As she cast her gaze back to the raft, she caught sight of Hughes' words, wound tight and brief like a viper ready to strike:

The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.

And the words sang to her. The water's voice enticed her. And she was parched. And she had never been asked for a kiss before. The romance was brief, as the best of summer are. But she felt safe, wrapped in the warm clear kiss of the lake. The pain too was brief; waves of euphoria supplanted her sense of shock, the initial terror of something so new undermined by the pleasure of belonging, of acceptance. For perhaps the first time she felt truly in good company, proud to share this magic with those who led her here, who captured her imagination, who brought her to such a tender and devoted lover as her lake.

Her brother told the police what he knew of her fascination with the isolated forest shrine. They dredged the lake, then, for the first time in the town's history, and brought up a lone, swollen corpse.

Wordplay

Words are just lies we use
to play at the truth,
crude facsimiles of real things
like sex and fistfights,
sunshine moonshine and hopes,
and the nightmares that, like
good sex and fistfights and
sunshine moonshine and hopes,
leave you collapsed on your back,
chest heaving, forehead slicked with sweat.

Still Life with Still Frames

Still Life with Still Frames
A Poem in Eight Parts

A Moment Late
-in which his first brush with chaos upsets his worldview-

The cameraman captures his quarry in mid-stride
as the young girl turns to her left.
In the next moment, the image is perfect.


In The Negatives
-in which his vagaries of the past take flight-

As his camera rewinds,
the last frame pressed neatly into place,
he comes to realise
that he will be forced to relive
a week of misery.

He wonders, however,
if, in the negatives,
a new perspective
will show its face.


The Blessing of Silver Bromide
-in which his sense of revision extends too far-

Forced to reverie by the stills,
he finds that it is easier to portray his own reality
in the near-black of his dark cave
than it is behind the shutter;

walking in the light,
reality is right there,
so close,
tangible but untouchable,

while in the darkroom,
it is spread flat before him
and a single drop of a chemical
can change reality forever.


As Zeus Severed Man
-in which his uncertain aesthetics settle-

He broods over the drying photo sheet,
acutely aware of the imperfections,
the inconsistencies between the printed page
and the vision screaming out to him
from deep within.

Art, he considers,
is perception.
The raging muse can inspire,
but the artist cannot portray
the true form of the flame.

Imperfection, he considers,
is art.


Nulla Dies Sine Linea or, Not a Day Without a Line
-in which his struggle to persevere seems bleak-

The young photographer,
his aspirations birds
with clipped wings,
sits cross-legged upon the floor,
his portfolio spread wide and empty before him,
the jaws of the future gaping from its depths.


Ars Gratia Nihil or, Art for the Sake of Nothing
-in which he perseveres, perhaps-

Servile,
he works to placate the violent muse;
she is not an inspiration but a force
of drudgery,
snapping whip and
flinging stone.

In these hallowed halls,
creativity comes not from within,
but from the clenched fist of
professor - expert - master of her craft -
when in reality,
creation must come from the artist-within.

Freed,
his is the life of expression,
happily absent from the
dark realm of academia.


Separation Anxiety
-in which his regret screams rapture-

Pawing endlessly through
page after page of
old photos,
he wonders what he has
made of his life.

At all the key moments,
he is there,
not in the scene,
not participating,
just preserving.

Now,
he sits with his camera,
alone.


Perscribi Non Est Esse or, To Preserve is Not to Be
-in which his tenuous aesthetic shatters-

His world of still frames
crumbles about his feet
(it's not the disparate moments which he may choose to live,
but a steady flow of time with which he can not
force-feed the half-starved, carnivorous shutter).
Each frame is silver-kissed
and in darkness given to light
(his art is womb-carried, painfully born,
but static, always immature,
powerful, a thing of life, but dead if left alone).
The camera is plenipotentiary,
the product impotent
(beauty is not a moment cast apart from the whole,
but the aggregate of life, of second-by-second struggle,
which not even memory's lens can capture).