Poem 504

This poem only fully revealed itself to me when I found the title … it’s about how the advent of motion picture film transformed our conception of time – once we could freeze-frame it, slow it down, speed it up or make it go backwards time became visible to us in ways it had never been before the invention of cinema, we started to see the world as if we were a camera, to gain a bird’s eye view of the great river we’re in …

( Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory is the first scrap of motion picture film ever recorded in 1895 … )

Fabric Of Time (Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory)

I kill with an image
                                     light splattering
against a wall never drying
I pray with the wail of planes diving
into the sea
                         the corkscrew motion of a plant
unwinding from the soil
I work inside a drum turning the sound
of the human voice into a series of steps
I shut like a flower on a bee 
                                                       enclosing
the rapist in sweet wax

        see the city sweat
        steam and beads of metal
                                                              the fan of the sea
        whirs and stops
                                        whirs and stops

your heart could pull itself to pieces
                                                                        your heart
is waiting for its bullet of fat
loaded slowly
                             yesterday I saw a dog in mid-air
snatch a frisbee
so clearly
I can't imagine him
touching earth
                              again