EXT: GALAXY DRIVE-IN. NIGHT.

the tip-tilted car rears back
as if in a vision
Jacob fighting the angel
perhaps

little hills undulate
grey orderly graves
from which strange trees sprout
stranger fruit

we clamp a pair to our windows
to hear the word
from our sponsors—
the other cars stare

at the white screen
praying for a suitable interval
to grope or kiss
or use the loo

as the wide blue
dims to darkness
the better set off
the stars

CROSS FADE:

? meets Eliot Ness meets Eisenstein

divide by three carry I
point zero dream recurring
ceilings high with loft light shafts vent in
the clock bears away its crawling army of time
bears the leather skinned rhinos by
untouchable pram step by step smoke or sweat
wheels there on collapse the black eye blood
trickles out to ask the mice the strategy of goodbye

FADE UP:

Stolen

I have procured time for us
and I forget
the name of the show

I sit and watch it with you
your hair so near
the dark whorl of your ear

my body
responds to your body
insisting always

you leave and I leave
and the story goes on
without us

FADE OUT

THE END

Listen to a recording of Ivy Alvarez reading her poem ”Poetry Picture Show – tryptich”.

See moving image adapaption of Ivy’s poem as a Quicktime (ideal for Mac users or PC users with Quicktime installed; better quality but slightly longer download).

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Promo for Can You Feel Me Dancing?
[1986] starring Justine Bateman as Karin.

Karin feels the rays against her eyes & sways,
two ticket stubs in her hand, invitations inside
her carry-bag. Larry arrives presently, guiding
the cup towards her face. Coke’s strong motion

against ice. Her brother’s hair is spiky to touch,
of course, echo of freeway traffic in his shaking
left hand. Just like his personality. He uses chop-
sticks to make beats when they order take-out.

Always watching that show – The Fall Guy – in
between his practice, driving Karin to work &
wishing he was blind. So would that help, if I was
blind, just like you Karin? She heard disbelief in

his Fall Guy voice when she said she wanted
to go to The movies? What the? You? I, no way!
Reaching over to touch her arm & say sorry,
expertly removing the Coke from her grasp.

The cinema’s cooling system hits Karin’s face
like a museum of the dark. The preview starts
but Larry’s talking about his band The Cathode
Rays & how he’s been giving it some thought

& has decided to leave home. Karin’s trying to
make it out, like some kind of children’s movie, all
that Disney tinkling on the keys … the cinema’s
roaring with subliminal advertising & though

it has no obvious effect on Karin, who is to
say what might happen when an image passes
through a person, as the blip-verts did. Their
hot velocities, yesterday evening, downtown.

The premiere this afternoon is for another of
Justine Bateman’s teen films. Karin lined up for
tickets all day outside the radio station offices,
on that wind-blown interstice of the new city.

Dancing makes you free. You’re in an invisible
machine, standing upright, & each movement of
your body bends space & time. For Karin, that
moment before lift-off comes like a swoon, or

a screen kiss at the end of a dance. She freezes
in mid-air like Superman before a blue screen,
or a magician’s assistant, supported by strings,

listening for the end of each scene. A minimum
of crowd noise, just the tube’s silver surf. The
way it was that afternoon at home when she sat
& listened all the way through it. That silence

just before the evening news began, that high
& lonely message, the dead air calling home.
That cessation, at some core aural level, of her
mother’s progress across the lounge’s lino floor,

stunned by a headline. The moment between
dancing & love-making, then, amounts only to
a way of saying the same words, singing the
same tunes. She & Richie dance near the bar,

her feet on top of his white dancer’s shoes.
Now, the moment the movie begins, Larry’s
talking about his mobile phone & how when
he types in movies it mistakes it for mother &

Karin wonders if he even knows the movie’s
started & that this is how it feels to fall in love.
The moment after that moment between,
When people become lovers in lanes or catch

commuter buses. That musky hum, of things
we know of that are yet to happen. Advertorial
dreams, or the snicker of a game-show hostess
off-camera. Heaters the crew might have trained

on the site of their screen love’s consummation,
a warmth that she alone could not provide, not
in a sex scene, & certainly not with him. & so, in
the cinema toilet cubicle, Karin sits listening as

two girls discuss Justine Bateman’s after-party
outfit, her uniform for the obligatory autograph
session (a script whose identity tends to unlock
big brass doors that hadn’t even been there one

moment before). Unravelling the true import of
a winning smile or the act of peering, winsomely.
All just last week’s stocktake sales to her. Parting
with her invitation at the door, Karin’s hit by a

whirl of silk scarves whose dialect her skin still
remembers & then she hears the voice of Karin
& Larry’s introducing her as his sister & saying
how she’s blind & how she likes that other movie

she was in & Justine Bateman’s going Hi Karin
& then Oh then Oh, I see & Karin’s just standing
there shaking, going No. No you don’t. Across the
street the last supermarket has already closed but

Karin’s in the middle of the road, sensing both
the kerb & the figure she guesses is still Justine.
& she’s trying to say that even though the end is
coming soon, more than TV, more than cinema

or drive-in even, how movies to come to her in
her radio-play dreams & then Justine’s stopping
her, the taxi’s arrived & Larry’s telling her to get
in & she hasn’t even said goodbye & when the

soundtrack cuts out & it’s cold & Karin recalls
that she never did learn to dance, despite all of
their encouragement & now it’s snowing in Los
Angeles & she’s the only one here who knows.

Listen to a recording of David Prater reading ‘Karin Revisited’ ‘

See moving image adaptation of David’s poem as a Quicktime (ideal for Mac users or PC users with Quicktime installed; better quality but slightly longer download).

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we see a city at dawn: a man wearing a beret
idling along the cobbled street on a pushbike
then a girl wearing a scarf and carrying
one of those long loaves of bread
in her basket, bought at a local bakery!
It must be Hollywood: and it is! Though
with a French savoir-faire and a touch of
je ne sais quoi. As we get used to the silky
black and white, and the smooth lighting, we realise
we have been drawn into one of those indoor-
outdoor binary universes: when the action happens
indoors, the lighting is perfect, a studio in Burbank, say,
where even in the phoney park the light is just right.
But in the “real€ outdoors it’s windy and overcast
and the lighting is kind of muddy and
the passers-by look suspicious and distracted,
so it must be Paris, or a version of it.

Yes, in a dive in Paris the hep cats are jumping,
jiving like it was the forties, when in fact
rock’n’roll has come and gone, JFK
is President, and the Ford Edsel is old hat.
Then we see the hero’s name: Ram Bowen.
Can they be serious? A name like that,
and Paul Newman with a trombone? Well, this is
a Paris of the mind, where ordinary suffering humanity
get to be pushed around by a bad script, so
anything can happen. The hero’s buddy is a black guy,
but he’s played by Sidney Poitier and wears
a suit and tie and a wristwatch and a short haircut,
so he’s all right — however deeply touched by
the madness of art — that is, jazz entertainment.

Then two women arrive on holiday:
one white, divorced, with two kids back home,
and the other black and single. So we have
four Americans in Paris but with angst
instead of fun: these jazz dudes may be polite
and press their shirts, but poor Ram:
his struggle with the demon of art and all those
late nights make him despondent.

So through the sets of matched doubles
day after day the Jane Austen problem
keeps rearing its ugly head: ladies,
how do you catch your man, when he’s
a wild free spirit who suffers for his art?

Of course there’s a resentful older woman
with a French accent: we see her checking the till
in the cellar at daybreak when the crowds have gone,
and cooking, but she keeps to the shadows,
nursing her hurt beauty behind a veil of makeup.

We get a clue as to why Ram is a musician,
not a writer: Paris is picaresque, he says.
His new girl friend Lillian misses this,
or maybe gets it and neglects to correct him,
shaking her blonde hair, straightening her gloves,
waving her handbag at the expensive scenery,
thinking — perhaps — that picaresque is French
for picturesque, and not wanting to
put the kibosh on a blossoming affair:
the guy’s Paul Newman in mufti, after all.

Meanwhile Sydney Poitier has a tormented talk
with his dusky lady friend Connie: color,
the question of color, that he can avoid in Paris.
Should he go back to New York and face it?
The color problem that brave Americans are
painfully working through, white and black alike,
maybe it’s his duty: she says it’s his duty
until his teeth ache, but then she says
she wants to have dozens of children.
What’s a guy supposed to think?

Ram wakes up late from the hangover of music.
He and Lillian have long talks about how
art eats you up, and we note that Ram
wears his wristwatch to bed, no doubt needing to time
what happens between those pressed white sheets.
As dawn breaks over tourist-flavoured Paris
he yawns and rises, his hair perfectly combed.
How can you tell if a man’s art is authentic?
Why, opines the lady, it’s the way he made me feel.
She speaks to him of Ram Bowen in the third person,
and addresses his dimple, which broods in silence.
Honey, he insists, I live music, morning
noon and night! Meanwhile her outfits
are astonishing: one beautiful coat after another,
scarves, gloves, hats: the product of resourceful
shopping as wide-ranging, committed and passionate
as Ram’s devotion to his trombone.

Yes, Ram is hitched to his mournful trombone
and we have the feeling that one day
he’ll find himself alone with the thing,
an old couple who don’t much like each other.

“We are the night people!€ the nicely-dressed
black man exclaims on the tourist boat,
“and it’s a whole different world!€ Sidney
is hinting at a kind of underground where
moral values are reversed, where being cool
is better than being prosperous and where art
has usurped Mammon’s place on the altar.
Then he checks his watch and adjusts his tie
and the illusion breaks up into ripples.
He’s a type, not a person, a vacant role
waiting to be imitated and filled in,
a cool black dude with the race problem
and a stern girl friend to worry about.

They play some music as an interlude
from the dialogue, though for Ram
we know that this view is back to front.
Now why is that saxophone playing second fiddle
to a trombone? Have you ever seen a band
with a dominant trombone? Is it because
Paul is more handsome than Sidney?
Taller? More white, let’s say? Then
we are asked to believe that Louis Armstrong,
America’s ambassador of cultural goodwill,
is some great giant of modern jazz, oh please,
gimme a break, he was briefly avant-garde
before the Great Depression, long ago,
and the furious God of Bop has long since
consigned him to the dustbin of history
and the lounge rooms of the middle class.

Now Ram’s pal the coke fiend is snorting heavily —
it’s his way, he says. Well, he’s a French Gypsy,
not a regular guy. Now Ram makes him
see his future in the figure of an old friend
ruined by drugs, busking on the street,
drooling and plunking on a tuneless guitar.
Gypsy, see a doctor, Ram says earnestly,
suddenly the concerned bourgeois. Then
more tourist epiphanies — shopping and kissing —
and as Ram hugs his blonde under an umbrella
an abashed camera coyly looks down
at his slacks and highly-polished casual shoes.

In this cloudy autumn weather they
cast no shadows, like devils, and chez nous
read the Herald Tribune just to keep in touch.
In the corner, a television set. This movie
might well appear there, titled The Tender Trap.
Sidney goes crazy with love and buys
more flowers than he can afford.

Then Ram meets a powerful agent
who knows everything — Ram is good,
but his music is not good enough,
says the wise man. That’s an opinion,
but not a life plan. What to do? Being moody,
that’s not suffering, you have to be a bastard
like Rimbaud. He used to keep lice in his hair
so he could flick them at passing priests, and
for a while there he was a sodomite —
no blondes for him — and when he got moody
he killed a man by throwing a rock at him.
And in the end he tore up his talent
and left all that art shit behind. So, Ram,
marry the blonde or the junk or the trombone,
just quit pissing around, will you?

At last Lillian comes to rest in her hotel room,
exhausted by her efforts to persuade a dumb guy
to marry her, in a wilderness of dishevelled suitcases
and loose shopping. Then he turns up, then
he has an attack of gloom and abandons her.

Oh, Ram! You and the script writer both
seem to have lost your grip at the climax:
a more authentic person has taken over
and inhabited this blonde like a virus and

as the train for Le Havre chugs out of the station
in a cloud of steam I realise that Lillian
is smarter and more fun than Ram, and maybe
she’s better off alone on the boat train heading
back to New York and her two kids, where some other
more interesting movie is about to begin.

E N D
____________________
Notes: Paris Blues, black and white, 1961, directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman as Ram Bowen and Sidney Poitier as Eddie Cook, with Newman’s wife Joanne Woodward as tourist Lillian Corning and Diahann Carroll as her friend Connie Lampson. Louis Armstrong’s ample ambassadorial grin has a small part.

Listen to a recording of John Tranter reading ‘Paris Blues‘

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I; thinking about how
all those old movie stars were
supposed to glow.
Searching for your celluloid halo
in the Elvis Costello yellow light.
Shrinking fast as

apertures open all the way
along the suburban street.
A sudden and meaningful second
glance; a child playing
and, perched on a wire,
a teenage girl who looks
like you would have.
Bored.
Smoking.
Contemplating a life
of ugly firemen,
balding surgeons
and tardy lovers. Then out again.
Framed ambivalence to potential
break downs, plot twists,
crime scenes,
first kisses,
frost on windows,
falling autumn leaves,
the psychosis of church bells,
analogies about fish or football,
knowledge of history,
architecture
or art.And further still:
Bridge and overpass,
city skyline,
dry fields,
canola,
cows,
1980’s Fords
line dancing across the planes.
The farm where I was born
(Or somewhere just like it).The crumbling edge
of things.
The coast.
The waves.
Eyes in stirrups, expanding
horizons, expecting and otherwise.Until the world is just a shape
and you
and I
not
even
specks.
Unsound-
tracked.
Unedited.
Locked in a frozen tango.
Lacking the holy continuity
of marker boards and out-takes.

Of key lines like;
‘I do not know you tomorrow.’
Waiting forever for the lens
to time-lapse our lives.

Listen to a recording of Briohny Doyle read ‘The widest wide shot’

See moving image adaptation of Briohny’s poem as a Quicktime (ideal for Mac users or PC users with Quicktime installed; better quality but slightly longer download).

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‘A shot, usually involving a distant framing, that shows the spatial relations among the important figures, objects and setting in a scene.’

The doctor hands you a splinter.
You hold it carefully. You wrap and tend it,
and it wakes you at night with its small wails, its relentless hunger.
You return to the surgery to see ‘the films’,
in which hidden parts of your body star.
Looking at yourself onscreen, from beyond,
you become crazy absurd swirls of dark and light.
You move past that vain glimpsed-reflection impulse to preen,
straight to a lurch of self-critical disgust, spotted with denial.
The doctor notes the salient features, as though he is a teacher,
and you his star pupil, destined to outgrow him.
He clears his throat, but in a healthy genteel sort of way
that suggests nothing more about him than a schooling in tact.
He would like to ask your permission to show the film,
but he is shy with you, your new resplendence so dazzles.
Like your friends, your children, your colleagues,
he is speaking to you with a new voice: a careful, respectful sort of voice,
mindful of the insouciance and the trouble you are cultivating within.

2. Cut-In

‘An instantaneous shift from a distant framing to a closer view of some portion of the same space.’

The splicing part is easy. There are tools used for cutting the negatives.
Words and phrases have the precision of surgery, and the practice.
Something clean about it: the excision. No room for doubt or faithless nights.
A series of bright scrubbed professionals wax: how positive they are.
We make one incision. Pop in and nip it out.
Like pop and nip, your face assumes the benignity of a picture book.
Reassurance is poured on you, treacly, and your bitterness occludes.

Inside, there is pacing, and the moon’s thin nail is bitten to bleeding.
The nights linger on like guests who don’t take the hint,
sullen-coloured, lit with an illusory pre-dawn glow.
You watch the days start up like so many coughing cars.

3. Continuity Editing

‘A system of cutting to maintain continuous and clear narrative action’

Through the stages of grieving like a horse at a gymkhana,
only it’s all offscreen. Call action, and you are strong and blithe.
This is the ‘cheat cut’. Everything looks roughly the same,
though technically it’s not. Like the day after a death.
The sun rolls up about where yesterday’s did,
and if there was a tree yesterday, a gnarled grudge, or someone’s worry beads,
they’re there too. It’s as though the props department has been at work,
while the editors have been dreaming, the director nonchalant.
And there are accolades: you are seen as having come through.
You are not making a fuss, or keeping it together.
In your caravan before your face is prepared for you
your handkerchief twists, your eyes are bloodshot.
The nights are drenched in the music that makes you remember.
You learn the script, but your voice sounds far away.
Yet only on close inspection would you pick the yoking together
The pretence, of days that don’t match,
Things that join up only with art.

4. Discontinuity Editing

‘Any alternative system of joining shots together using techniques unacceptable within continuity editing principles. Possibilities would include mismatching of temporal and spatial relations, violations of the axis of action, and concentration on graphic relationships.’

The clowns rehearse outside the next caravan.
You crush words hard against your teeth,
and they fly out of your mouth like shots,
or you spit them, blooded and cutting,
fretted and strung with beads of shiny compressed feeling.
You are drowning inside yourself, and alone there.
Anger jerks out of you, or unstopping crying that falls fluent
the way it does in dreams: salty, benedictory.
The skirt of your feelings is stuck in the car door,
and flaps at passers-by without your knowing.

5. Overlapping Editing

‘Cuts that repeat part or all of an action.’

In the dream you sent me a letter.
A very slow dream, a very short letter, read in slow motion.
I walked down the path, opened the letterbox, took the letter out:
The letter didn’t say much. But a letter from a dead man
is a remarkable one, and in the dream I knew I should keep it.
Even as it dissolved in my hands, and I forgot what you had said,
I was thinking of this evidence of conversations after death.
When I brought the letter inside, my hand, of course, held sand.
I couldn’t keep hold of the grains, and soon there was nothing.

(All epigraphs are from David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 6th edition, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001). ‘

Listen to a recording of Felicity Plunkett read ‘The Negative Cutter: An Introduction to editing’

See moving image adaptation of Felicity’s poem as a Quicktime (ideal for Mac users or PC users with Quicktime installed; better quality but slightly longer download).

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2
/ the chair you are sitting on would make a more reliable witness /

3
/ so hold a gun to my head and tell me Godot is here /

4
/ i can tell by the rust on your lips that you haven’t lied for weeks /

5
/ i love it when we swap hands in the dark then pretend we’re both alone /

6
/ lets pour our lives into each other’s mouths count to 3 and swallow /

7
/ lets staple faith to our favourite guide dog and get out of here /

8
/ you drive the car and i’ll build the road /

9
/ his eyelids became transparent as he thought about you /

10
/ the rain was singing through your teeth /

11
/ she had already put in her application to become the sense of smell /

12
/ she placed two lanceolate leaves over his eyes and told him to wait until autumn /

13
/ if you force the stars through a sieve light suddenly becomes edible /

14
/ in a sugar cube the size of a spare bedroom Krzysztof sleeps /

15
/ it’s not unusual for memories in scuba gear to climb out of a well made coffee /

16
/ by chance they turned our heads into dice and threw us across the table /

17
/ we put in a window where our life used to be /

18
/ you put rumours in cages and convinced your friends to feed them /

19
/ i’m sick of dragging your big grey heart around in this rickshaw /

20
/ as i crawl on graphite limbs on a white floor to the foot of your bed /

21
/ treat the sun like a bitch and make it shine /

22
/ go and pull Artaud out of his bath with the hooks on your tongue /

23
/ she thought about carbonating his blood and drinking it with ice /

24
/ the entrails left over from the sin are the most delicious part /

25
/ i once had a job changing the light-bulbs in Francis Bacon’s paintings /

26
/ the safest place i could be right now would be inside your lungs /

27
/ don’t answer this question until i’m far enough away to be the answer /

28
/ so i began my address to this crowd of anonymous people dressed in their fly screen suits

29
/ through a slit in the door as you undressed i saw the black and yellow stripes on your torso /

30
/ although beautifully polished Kafka’s shoes could not evade movement or stillness /

31
/ weren’t you the first man to take out a restraining order against his shadow /

32
/ you could pierce the Devil’s nipples with those eyes /

33
/ how can you just put handles on your victims and carry them around like that /

34
/ i had to walk away with only the loose change from redemption in my pocket /

35
/ keep the truth under the foreskin of a dead man and freeze it for the second coming /

36
/ i am about to tell you what Eve really said to Adam /

37
/ the train said very little before it hit me /

38
/ they found the wings then 300 metres further along the body of the angel /

39
/ he asked that his arms be at 45º so that rigor mortis would make him into an arrow /

40
/ now that we’re in control which half of the world do you want /

Listen to a recording of Nathan Shepherdson reading ‘Splice’

See moving image adaptation of Nathan’s poem as a Quicktime (ideal for Mac users or PC users with Quicktime installed; better quality but slightly longer download).

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What we know about form
we keep governed with limitations,
so experience assumes only a certain
range of shapes, beyond which
it becomes desire – boneless,
creaseless, like the formation
of an idea. A man and a woman
walk through a park as though it is a poem.
He holds her at the elbows, and looks
as if he would like to do violence
to her, or to anyone. She might be used
as a definition for the word grave:
her cheeks are high and white
as a limestone cliff; her small mouth
opens and closes like an oiled hinge.
Their breaths are ornaments
that kiss and disappear. The whole
tableau is entirely contained
as if this kind of still life could exist
beyond the moment of its framing,
as if his grip might stage the birch
windbreak, the orioles, the white grass
in a mannered forever to rival heaven.
Then, a signal from somewhere else –
the dry, elastic cough of a tennis ball,
and two anonymous hands swinging
wooden racquets back and forth –
shatters formality. He lets her go,
and they split apart easily, as erratic thwacks
from the gravel court echo through their bodies.
The unseen players assemble and fracture
in the mind – form and its limitations –
and the brief November air thickens
with the imprint of their movements. The man
stalks off in one direction; the woman
in another. This time it is a clean break –
careless, and literary – while, in the underbrush,
a rough, textured stretch of grass sharpens
into the shape of a body. And still the sound
of a ball being hit over and over where
there is no ball present. Though it is not
a myth, there is a lesson in all this. Look.
It has to do with visibility and with truth.

Listen to a recording of Sarah Holland Batt reading ‘THE LIMITATIONS OF FORM’

See moving image adaptation of Sarah’s poem as a Quicktime (ideal for Mac users or PC users with Quicktime installed; better quality but slightly longer download).

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And “actors are beautiful€ and a little like gods,
with the same public, pandemonious sex lives.
And in this particular deus ex machina
there is the suggestion in the actor of a blue
god playing in the background like a day moon
or a rock star. Astrological family romance –
the governing stars, the fool who speaks in couplets
and somewhere there the chorus singing now of

‘Krishna and Radha in the Dance of Love’.
And leading them is the serious courtesan
and she’d learnt from the time of her capture
“the twin arts of poetry and of music€
specifically the ghazal, that bi-valve bird
of couplets, one wing spread, the other wing
the rhyme that comes and then returns its self
to its small self, a mirrored or projected thing.

But the subtitles can’t do it; they say instead
that “the moon alone, in night’s embrace, rode in fire-
flies on a palanquin of stars.€ And the two gods
were there in the lovers, an architectonic
pop star and her boy, shouldered by the disco chintz
of the river. And the camera plays there like a faun,
cuts there then comes back to that narratological
lady. And she sings “On the banks of the Yamuna
Krishna and Radha in the Dance of Love.€

But “where does Krishna end and Radha begin?€
Krishna was a blue god, an aphrodisiac
oyster on the studio river banks, suggested
by an actor (future politician) and all-round
good guy (former professional villain) and his love,
a “woman-child€ with a milk pot, a garlanded
cow-girl. And the rub, when it comes, is that despite
(or perhaps because of) the “many gifts of fate€ the

I N T E R M I S S I O N

sees him thwarted, and, like the god his character
suggests, “his love is married to another€. For,
(from the back of the DVD) “little is certain
in the realm of human relationship.€ So he waits:
for the inevitable end, where the final frame
will frame his dying thoughts (the text, in subtitles,
“where did it go, my childhood?€) but also for
the deus ex machina, that comes in the flash

of lightning on statues, a shattered temple,
two scattered families miraculously united
in song, the westernized girl returned to a sari,
things that were lost, returned; vengeance had; deities
channeled; death enacted; the carnival finale
played and then replayed in the afternoon
and then at night. Even, in the evening, walking out
of the theatre into the sky “like the moon,
on a palanquin of stars€ is like a ride

into the sunset it feels so pure and final
though the sunset always happens again, it’s good
that way a reliable kind of device
it has a Swiss soul like the Alps where Bollywood
lovers go for abstract dream-scapes where they can wear
what they want (lycra) and they can kiss without kissing
and not worry about their parents or about Fate
who stands high on the hill a lonely goatherd
while the soft Teutonic extras flock and shake

in pastoral breezes – they never act, they just spectate –
it’s nice to be so honest about drama! It’s
like that place you find if you want to look between
the screen and the projector where the air turns slight
and milky as though it held up a blue god.
And, like the back of a DVD you could say
that “the machinery of gods is slight and terrible€
or “the camera is a god and the projector
is a blue god, blue, filled with things and images,

but empty like a god€, and if you’re blue yourself
you can kill a Sunday afternoon with movies
and pretend that there’s no world between the picture
and the thing, like in that dream I had, my favourite
dream, where an outdoor movie screen that showed the moon
shifted and blew out, till the screen was just the sky,
and the sky was just the screen, and the eye that looked
(deus ex machina) thought “the moon€ was just the moon.

Listen to a recording of Emma Jones reading ‘Bollywood Lyric’

View moving image adaptation of Emma’s poem as a Quicktime (ideal for Mac users or PC users with Quicktime installed; better quality but slightly longer download).

See moving image adaptation of Emma’s poem as a Windows Media File (better for PC users with a slower connection, quality not quite as good but faster download).

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Listen to a recording of Kate Lilley reading ‘When Ladies Meet’

View moving image adaptation of Kate’s poem as a Quicktime (ideal for Mac users or PC users with Quicktime installed; better quality but slightly longer download).

See moving image adaptation of Kate’s poem as a Windows Media File (better for PC users with a slower connection, quality not quite as good but faster download).

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Peter Henry Lepus hasn’t been to Afghanistan, or
to Pakistan.
Scratching one ear reflectively,
he considers. The movie shows a lot of those countries’
brown deserts,
as well as some of the roads in Iran,
which Clifta may want to use her many eyes on –
if she is to look €¦ for the ground €¦ of Omar Khayyam,

whose Khayyam name, his father’s, seems to mean
he came from a family of tent-makers.

A friend from those pre-Gutenberg times,
Nizam al Mulk, Omar’s co-student,
wrote a ‘memoire’ of Omar
that Peter has read about
(the friends were sent to a Muslim scholar, an Imam,
to study the Koran).

Peter’s also read that the Persian calendar
was re-designed by Omar,
who was ‘learned in science, as well as astronomy,
wrote a ‘table’ of the stars, & an algebra book
that travelled to Europe.

The other of Khayyam’s two school friends, Peter’s found out,
later became
the notorious
austere & frightening
‘Old Man of the Mountain’,
who, from a castle south of the Caspian,
developed the ‘Cult of the Assassin’,
about whom, & about which,
rumours abound,
partly due
to the tales told
to an early travel-writer,
who visited the terrain
about one hundred & fifty years later, recording what he heard
with pen & ink
as he did not have a camcorder, within a volume
titled: The Travels of Marco Polo.

Peter, who’s been searching more recent books
on behalf of Clifta, finds that Khayyam’s bones
are said to lie in something called a ‘Tomb’
& that he died
in the first quarter of the twelfth century

in an ancient Iranian city with at least
three spellings, the most recent of which

Peter’s found, after many fumblings through old books,
seems to be Neishabur.

He has not found Neishabur yet,
on this movie’s maps
which flash by fast
showing its journey’s routes in red.

He remembers the little spider’s telling him
of her mother, reading, in a Sydney park, aloud
to her & all the little siblings, ‘Arachnid Fitzgerald’s translations
from the Persian’ – a poem which was recited to him
solemnly in the Iraqi desert many, many times;
the poem ran:
They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
the Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep
And Bahram, that great Huntsman, the Wild Ass
Stamps o’er his Head, and he lies fast asleep.

There may be places in this movie that Clifta may feel

she needs to go €¦ if she’s to ‘find’
Bahram, the great
Huntsman of the Rubaiyat,
whom she believes.may be her ancestor€¦
even, he thinks despairingly, inside her imagination €¦
There may be digital videoed roads she wants to travel
in her search; he’s seen an Iranian bus’s red
Sydney-Huntsman-Spider-concealing curtains
that Clifta may want to travel on. There are cities too.
Esfahan & Qom he has found, on his own
map of Iran, & they are ‘represented’; here on this movie’s map
on a route to Tehran.
His long dark rabbit eyes
focus on Max’s screen,
where play
of the DVD
that’s been fast-forwarded,
has stuck. (Or is it merely stopped?) Braid says there are some scratches on it.
They’ve watched the same scene several times, & jumped,
to Peter’s surprise that a movie has them,
into CHAPTERS, (sequenced forward)
with long stretches of the movie’s story
left behind.

The name T E H R A N-
printed in large scarlet capital letters across the screen
points him to an idea. Planes fly to Tehran. If Clifta can get to Baghdad Airport, she
could perhaps stow away under a round white cap like the one
that Jamal wears, when he leaves Peshawar from the refugee camp
in northwest Pakistan, where the movie’s journey starts.
She will probably need to fly to Tehran, to begin her search, Peter thinks,
turning round to see if she is watching
any
of the movie’s many roads or its fewer maps. He thinks she should be. She is the one
who said, I want to go to Persia, NOW
And perhaps there may be people at the University there, who can help her.
Peering under the table he sees she has crawled into a large crack.
There seem to be two of her. Then, he realises. One ‘Clifta’ is the old skin,
thin, papery, that Clifta’s left behind.
The new Clifta crouches wet & strange (estranged from herself?) inside a larger skin
that Huntsman Spiders have to make, to grow. Her old skin was not big enough
to hold her.
Humans, as well as rabbits, Peter’s learnt,
live & die as one – they do not need
to change their skins, to grow up,
though all need for, ‘safe’ air to breathe,
& water€¦

The two young Afghanis on the screen have to change
their clothes – ‘to look Irani’ –
the caps they wore from Pakistan must also disappear.
They try to learn to make new sounds, speak Farsi, not Pashtu.
Enayat learns the word ‘snow’ in English.

Is it cinema verite? Braid asks, What is that? Peter wonders.
He has seen the word ‘cinema’ written in gold,
high up in some cities, above crowded streets, on buildings
he has not been inside. He does not know what cinema is,
nor that verite means ‘truth’ in French.
He has not seen it written
on any buildings, whole
or hollowed out by what Max called ‘Tomahawk cruise missles’,
in Baghdad, where he is now, nor has the word verite appeared.
It is over five months since Saddam’s huge stature
was pulled down – & that act – & scene
turned into photographs,
& recycled, for money,
sometimes with enigmatic US soldiers’ faces
& a few close-ups of excited teenage Iraqi boys, & men,
with stories about the ‘fall’ of Saddam’s regime
on newspaper front pages round the world.

In a hotel outside the Green Zone,
with a basement power supply
that Max has paid to use, Peter Henry Lepus,
Max, Braid, & occasionally Clifta
are trying to watch a DVD
which a journo friend of Max’s brought in from London
that recently won the Golden Bear Award in Berlin
Isn’t it rather soon for it to be released as a DVD? Braid asks.

Max,
for once, in not listening to her. One arm
round her shoulder he says,
They used two Sony digital cameras, one left on all the time, & a camcorder./
It has the feel of a doco, but it’s facto-ficto. The route was travelled first by the writer &/
director who followed people smugglers’ routes, collected stories, & came back later/
to shoot, sometimes using guerrilla doco tactics, to catch transactions in backrooms
between people who didn’t know they were being filmed.
No script. Few pros, mostly those in it
played the story’s versions of themselves.
It’s a distallation. People-smuggler experience
isn’t pleasant.

The last scene is shot in a mosque,
which Max says was filmed in London.
The younger one, Jamal, is grieving at last for his friend,
his cousin Enayatullah
who got sick in a black space inside a box, where
Max says the oxygen ran out;
there was not enough ‘good air’ to last forty hours for the ship’s journey,
which is marked, on the film, by a red line across blue, to Trieste,
from Turkey. The box is called a ‘container’.
The blue, Peter’s learnt, is what map-makers use
as a sign of sea or ocean:
if you know what it means, you do not need
to be able to read words; though, he has also found,
map-makers like to write words
across map’s blue
that tell which ocean or sea is pointed to.

Other people were travelling in that boat’s black space €¦
Afghanis, from the northwest €¦
Max says they’d be defined as ‘Economic refugees’,
in politician or migration official English,
an old man with a beard, a woman & her husband with their baby €¦
They got sick like Jamal’s friend
who was his cousin & arrived dead except Jamal & the baby Mehti,
who is shown, when the container’s at last opened,
trying ti put his mouth to his lifeless young mother’s breasts.
Braid is weeping quietly by the ending.
Peter, Max & Clifta who’s crawling,
still damp in her new skin,
under a bench by the old iMac’s table,
do not speak.

Max was in Doha recently
to watch some Al-Jazeera footage
of the Assault on Baghdad,
spent days, perched on a desk
watching interviews with grieving people
who’d lost mothers, husbands, daughters, wives,
sometimes all
of their families, after that, he watched
the later news stories
of the carnage that followed the
suicide bombers. An Iraqi driver he’d talked with
on his way back from Doha
‘d been blown up,
just after he & Max had parted.

It’s time-out for me from watching replays of the’ real war’, he says,
leaning back on the green plastic chair
to re-watch a movie that’s not showing either missiles,
a city sky line with buildings burning
or debris blown upward
by landed bombs. You’re hard, Braid accuses him quietly,
removing his arm, getting up, with the free encyclopaedic extract
from Wikipedia in one hand. She’s headed for the bedroom, to read about
the facts behind the movie’s making on her own.
Peter does not relax from his stiff squat.
Both ears erect as he watches what is re-screened,
he is thinking back to past images.
The film does not show him any libraries
that he might send Clifta to,
to begin to search for records by & for herself.
He is beginning to suspect
that ‘Bahram’.
Clifta’s ‘great Huntsman’, from the poem
‘Arachnid Fitzgerald translated’,
perhaps from Edward
FitzGerald’s very free, renderings
of the Persian of Omar Khayyam,
may not have been a Sydney Huntsman Spider
or even one from Australia,
&, in fact, may never have lived, hunted,
or gone to sleep,
anywhere within this world.

Listen to a recording of J.S. Harry reading ‘Journeys Digital’.

See moving image adaptation of J.S. Harry’s poem as a Quicktime (ideal for Mac users or PC users with Quicktime installed; better quality but slightly longer download).

See moving image adaptation of J.S.Harry’s poem as a Windows Media File (better for PC users with a slower connection, quality not quite as good but faster download).

*thanks to Featherstone Productions. for loan of footage from film ‘I Witness’

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