CONJUNCTIONS:42, Spring 2004
Donald Revell
VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION: A SCREENPLAY
The bride of Heaven is Greer Garson.
In "Mrs. Miniver" God hears her
Breathing her white address into the emergency phone:
Starlings.
No help comes.
In the cinema of high-shoulders and the feathered toque
Even help is helpless.
And I am a bird in the cheap seats,
Calling backwards through the generations
Of Wise and Foolish Virgins--
Roberta, Aunt Mildred, Mother,
Can you see? Here is a new hat for each of you.
It is going to be war-time now, time for feathers,
And Mars, they tell me, has never been so close
To our spectacular and black & white Earth
As it is tonight. This is the movie we’ve chosen.
Nothing can stop the bombardment raining down
Upon the bride of Heaven in her white cottage, Starlings.
JULES AND JIM
The sky was very near.
Carved in stone
The sky was the hieratic face
Of Jeanne Moreau,
And the world was no place.
It was where Apollinaire had died.
It was where windmills did murder,
Where any man
Who is a pony only once
To only one child
Joined an army
Bringing death to the horses
And to the guitars inside them.
The sky was very near.
It had a girlfriend,
And thirty years later comes a letter
And a photograph too sad too vacant to describe
Although it is smiling.
Today the sky
In the Mojave desert is overfull
With sunrise and moonset.
The morning star
Says a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire.
In the field over there
A wild pony runs with his music wild behind him in a cloud.
Because of a great movie
I have lived this far this long,
My worlds by worlds destroyed,
But never the sky, which is a girl
I can see through and see
All the boys running to be near her.
AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE: A BASEBALL MOVIE
Another time, according to Gilchrist,
One summer morning Blake saw
The haymakers at their work, and amid them
Angelic figures walking. Gilchrist’s word
Is "amid" and not "among," meaning
The angels were at play in the home fields
And in the hearts of the haymakers.
Fast forward to the Vegetative Eye
Up in the bleachers, Ebbets Field
With the orphans and the black & white nuns.
Wm Blake becomes William Bendix, etc.
Angels in the Outfield, a cinema always shows,
Human hearts excel humanity, bursting forth
Out of breastbones or the spinning projectors
Into the open where they shine and live.
The word is "amid" and not "among."
My heart has an angel in it, just like yours,
Daily more tired of the work of me,
Waiting out the harvest time,
Waiting for the show to begin.
We are the orphans of ourselves soon
Taken in, God willing, by great poets or almost any movie at all.