The Moving Image
By Gareth Evans
Lines for Jonas Mekas after viewing his Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania*
“There are homes in the world where people cannot sleep.”
*
A man then
walking
out
across a roof
and walks
and does so
still
and walking
walking
now
the poem is the walking
and the light that found the walk
and the shadow that remains
*
a ceaseless gazing into the good light of the world, and the friendship of it all, the outstretched hand, the warm palm of the lens
*
the informed moment the enduring moment the ‘precise reality’ the moment of the moment onwards
on
*
the looking that unfolds in time
like the cloth opened together
over the long grain of the table
the meeting at the screen
and
across the years
assembly
and we eat
the bread
and what it means in all the tongues
the wine
and how we taste its light
*
“What do we do, coming home after twenty five years? Of course, we went to the well to drink the water… No wine ever tasted better.”
*
fire of the wood that made the water warm
where do we belong?
only in our arms
in the gathered shadows of the long held times
and in the mind we left behind
the hope of decent earth
when do we belong?
In the once-lived life that lifts like a swift
over the eaves
of evening come
*
“Nobody remembers there was a labour camp; only the grass remembers.”
*
harvest of the birds
their sifting of the fallen grain
their being grain
the flocking wonder
over and above
the threshing of the field
the wheat of all that grows here
the music of this place’s breathing air
scattered notes
of birds and people somehow
briefly back
a symphony of waiting, chorale
in the heart
the sowing of the bread
across the plate
the birds, the bread
their wondrous refrain
*
and then, an edit in the film that shows us how the world was once and might be once again:
they sing together
in the day
///
the garden’s great green tree
*
the light
that is
that was
that will be
all of now
amber
on the grass/land
in the world’s late afternoon
*
your children leave
the womb
the room
the home you make
the world
leave only the wind
ripple of their wave
their voices’ long farewell
across the wheat
the field is ploughed
into the darkening trees
then
along the path between
the shadow of the words
and the days’ wide open page
the moving image writes
such transports of the
light your looking found
across
the ancient water
new eyes for looking back
towards the gleaming season
of the earth,
the tread of now
the hallowed life
the moving
and the moving
still
the work that never ends
*
1.11.08, London
*1971/2. Screened with Jonas Mekas present and in conversation at the launch of ‘Cinema Nation’, 19.10.2008, Curzon Soho cinema, London. Thanks to Verena Stackelberg and Benn Northover; and to John Berger for clarification.
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