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| Jerome Rothenberg & Arie Galles: A Double-Headed Portrait with Clouds |
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
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
[note. For some time now I’ve been working
with Arie Galles on Graffite, a three-part
series of graphite drawings with poem accompaniments, a followup in some sense
to our earlier collaboration on Fourteen
Stations, some small part of which I was able to display previously on Poems and Poetics. In this instance Galles’s photo-based
drawings came first & my readings of them followed thereafter. An actual viewing of drawings and poems waits
of course for final publication, but my part of the over-all work is probably
clear enough for now from the words alone.
(J.R.).]
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