before dawn
so often these are opposite to fixing
a way of saying, i will meet you
in the land of grief that we may
put hands in that soil together
& look around
& tend to what grows & also dies
especially the underground
invisibles
while others announce
their comings & goings
with great fanfare between
stints of weeping into the
pools of their own reflections
where meanwhile
we know life here & death
& stay with the work
to make it good.
in flight
As the babies lost their cries,
keening women gathered them
to chests to gallop them over hills
past the shadowed valley,
snipers at the gates.
What else would a dragon keep
but these? Against theft
of treasures it could not
know the golden virgins:
the pose of the hour
was vigilance
against the useless piles,
and it curled at our ankles,
holding us to their warnings
against loss.
Eyes of every witness burned
and through tiny speakers
in our ears, the guards at the gate
said go home; the curators
of spectacle insisted, there’s nothing
and only the crazy and the sentenced
kept on and the angels at the floor
with the mops, and the dead.
Open casket equals open door
to enter the theater of mourning
then came hawks and the hawkers
went the blind mice Now run,
someone said, and we did then
the farmer’s wife.
Admission was free to the public,
see how they––
History was removed by the surgeons.
They held efficient needles to our lips,
we were the crimes against their progress
to be sentenced, but our eyes were burning
from the gas, and our faces wet
you fell three times
along the road
and we with you
even now
the guards feared.
*
From Flight Songs
With Jean-Luc Godard.
I prefer to work, you said, when people are against me. You embraced the struggle and resisted the embrace. They called your work a high energy fusion of jazz and philosophy; you confessed hot emotion, cold truth.
Your work grew in subtlety, complexity; your audience faded back to the diet they knew. Rumors that you had died made financing a challenge and you lamented the loss of doubt in an age with no past. No one knows anyone from before, you said.
You wished more would take the time to discover before they tried to please; to discuss before trying to convince. But it only takes a click these days, to find the previous shot. There’s no unspooling the reel; no moment-by-moment reversal. It takes no time to go back, so time is lost.
For you, the real story always revolved around the twin questions of your obsession: was it possible to tell, and where to begin?
***
Adapted from from Richard Brody’s New Yorker feature An Exile in Paradise: How Jean-Luc Godard disappeared from the headlines and into the movies, reposted last week in honor of Godard, who died on the 13th of this month at the age of ninety-one.
