David-Baptiste Chirot


A CINEMATIC ASEMIC




     for Gleb Kolomiets



Mists in offing turned, slow ripples in
water. Distant ships black, shadows on land.
Standing quietly in a daily repetition. Three birds now one, at the top of the sky.
Meeting, separating, three ideas with wings of wind. So close, the distant blue.
Wondrous disorder, churning all movements, moments. Colors, sounds all here, there.
Black hull, a heaping mass. Three lines horizontal, a sense of drama grows.


Girl in black, the cinema ticket taker. Wearing a white wing signal feather.
Slowly, a tide of wind rises, blowing through the lobby a doubling darkness.
Powerful assaults of an angry line, making a mangled melee among neon forms.
Twisting, stretching, moving through the entrance, fan-like lines disperse blackly
          into the darkness inside.


The screen—a gigantic space—appears, lodging white light. The moon
          controls numberless shadows.
A flood of limitless waves flows, quietly severing light and darkness.
A nameless anarchy rejecting the name signals a common contemplation.
Bristling with sudden colors, sea skies emerge from the rose-thorn curtain.


Curtain-abandoned, a whole vast space appears, empty even of wings of gulls.
A phantom ship vanishes. Shrouded in mists, a quiet ghost disappears.
The cinema, a fiction on an actual map, appears and disappears.
The visible sum of being exists when not among the mists.


Opening scene with a single ship rends the horizon’s pattern of being.
The whole composition is abdicated. A universe is thrown away.
A ship hidden by that universe is no longer guarded from its own absence.
Now present, moment by moment the ship is changing colors.


The clouds changing, a ship appearing—what is happening as a happening . . .
Each moment brings changes, momentous as Atlantis’ vanishing.
Greedily watching the movie, no one notices a universe thrown away.
Even a not noticing is a happening . . .


Happenings as palimpsests signal endless reconstructions.
Movie bells ringing signal endless single ships appearing.
Each instant the sound makes its own, incessant as the sea.
A ship, a bitter orange bobbing—set the sea bells to ringing.


A single bitter orange bobbing is being. Being sets the bells ringing . . .
Floating, sinking, hidden by a wave and not hidden, a bitter orange dot is being.
Ceaselessly blinking eye of being, a single bitter orange is floating east . . .
From the west without blinking a single black hull appears.


A black hull unblinking—a single bitter orange blinking—both aboard the sea—
Appearing, disappearing in the shifting light from the screen, seated beings watching being—
Being appearing and disappearing watching being appear and disappear, no one
          notices a happening—
A universe being thrown away is happening noticed or not—in the midst of eyes blinking
          and unblinking—
Cinema fictions unnoticed happening on an actual map noticing being happening unnoticed by being . . .


A happiness of seeing seeing happiness, a meeting of eyes facing eyes, an invisible horizon beyond the visible. Seeing like a bird takes wing towards horizons visible and, beyond, invisible. In regions visible appear ships, the sea, clouds, the sun, storms, the moon. Beyond, in regions invisible, never appearing boats never mar a sea . . . at the limits of layers of clarity, seeing cast off shackles and emerged, a being. Seeing, a being, flies into distances where boats never appear, never mar the seas. Seeing seeing its being never marred by laws, knows happiness . . .


Girl in black wearing a white signal feather, taking tickets for seeing through layers visible into the invisible, for seeing mists in offing turn among ships, among shadows.
Three ideas, a being taking flight on wings of wind. Three horizontal lines, a massed hull wondrous disorder churning a sense of cinematic drama. . ,

KIRO WORKS MILWAUKEE
CHRISTMAS DAY 2009

 
 
 
 
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