SOME LINES FROM PRAYING FOR FLOW

Twisting From Within tracks the episodic descent of the poem as it falls onto the screen interrupted by mundane flows of daily life, by fears, dreams, stories and memories in an unending desire to question and understand, to settle once and forever the uncatchable flow of events, offering the microcosmic falls or drops which result from bailing with a sieve.

Tripidium takes its title from the name of an ancient liturgical dance of two steps forward and one back. The poem explores this pattern of dance in relation to the darting back and forth in relation to time, memory, emotion, pulses, tidal flows, cycles of weather, through a series of stories, instructions and conclusions, dictating responsibilities that alternately lull and disturb our awareness.

Senseless in the Empyrium is an ontological awakening to moments of presence and explores the fiction of separation between inner and outer, self and others. It acknowledges senselessness both as absence of awareness and the inability to make sense of this.

And in my Flesh focuses on experiencing the physical body’s functioning in relation to breath and emotions; liminal states between sleep and waking; changes in the body made during the reception of memories; the dance of the body as it seeks flexible, stability of functioning within and amongst these flows of life.

Here is the beginning of Tripidium:

T R I P I D I U M

One day when extremely ancient,
my dance creaky, I may be blessedly
deaf, to the cracking and snapping
of the small parts of me which are
still mobile, I will continue as now
to dance the tripidium, not some
thing you seek to learn, not the
imitation of the heavenly dance,
the tripidium angelorum of St Basil,
but the opening and closing of doors,
the involuntary entrance and inexplicable
exits that occur, and there is no making sense
of them except in the beat of their flow,
the change of vision that they offer.
Forward, forward, back,
forward, forward, back,
as in the lapping of the tides,
the displacement of sand and seaweed
the taking away and the bringing back

There were two youths who will now
be old, or dead, one hovered on the
verge of our group, in an ontological
shiver, and his drawings were the same,
never quite there, once we met him
at the edge of the heath and he said
he was drawing from walls and flames
as Leonardo recommended, his spirit
lapped palely in his stolid body.
The other had protruding eyes rolling
between the curtaining folds of his lids,
he had a damp atmosphere, a brackish
smell, these fragments of them are
among the thousands of similar ones
in my dark larder of jars;
held as specimens, not for
medical or criminal record, but stored
there for some future use, which seems
to be this, a re-gathering or an inner census,
which brings everyone home even if
incomplete, in body bags of memory,
bits of them left on the field with
their scarlet jackets absorbing
and obscured by mud.
Some are Pana-Vista-Chroma-Vision
wide-screen people like Napoleon,
or other actors, indistinguishable now
from former clipped and silent
beings whose total lives are lived
outside the one tracking shot I
have of them.

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