Analogies between Cinema and a Painting by Anselm Kiefer – Sternenfall

Youth Hostel

Analogies between Cinema and 

a Painting by Anselm Kiefer – Sternenfall
I

Without a bill of lading
it filters down from opalescent skylights
in the Galleria d'Arte Moderna,
a canvas descending from the sky;
a cosmic champion
of Falling Star that
I would have gladly copied
had Kiefer's ingenuity
not anticipated me.  

But the museum could have
mistaken this for a Cinemascope
or a picture frame of nothing.

On the galactic background
an opaque material,
on the first floor
grimy ideas
tarred until it's art;
stellar wars under way,
carbonized zodiac,
planetary geometries
reduced to livid plasters,
votive daubs in neon;
absence of color,
negative of the universe,
triumph of cremation;

dissuasive of the hopes
of the spatial idealists?


II

What the Starfighter 
calls "night vision"
during take-off
is plasma of the dark,
parasite of the light
that pierces the ether and
deprives us of the view
until when the interval lasts
between the two times of film.

What's this painting represent?
a universal catastrophe
or whatever movies Hollywood, 
Cinecittà, Bollywood are like?

Matter is sizzling
falls along the skirting board:
ashtray of the universe,
urn for "stardust."

In the Major constellations 
the planetary colonies boast
the names of celebrated directors, others
are called by film titles
and for sure the names of minor gods
contend with each other.

From space we're inundated
by sonorous columns from films
that the A/V thieves
engrave in the minidisks 
of planetary rings.


III

The spectators fall,
old film buffs pass on,
while the Romantic poets
contemplate the sky for free
from the castle of Lerici;
two centuries later
their ghost-soldiers preside 
over stands in the stadium still,
assiduous in the infinite screen
of the cinema universe.
Science flings wide open
a new branch of knowledge:
spatial archaeology.
After Hollywood, Brakhage;
celluloid's gravedigger
superimposes still frames
and jokes about with acids.

The cinemas are temples
also known as planetary
and the screens altars.
We are stuntmen
devotees of a cult,
assiduous presences.
Opposite of the divinities
we are the mortals that
call out to them in vain
to pull from their distractions
while the film strip runs
out on the marble canvas
of our future grave.


IV

On the Weltanschauung
of the starry heavens
there is the treasure hunt,
hide: a starlet
of silent film.
There's one who expects
some explanations
from non-being or
from nearly nothing.
The philosopher rummages in
his pockets, fishes out a noumena
which the other hand sticks
in the "Mouth of Truth,"
formerly choked with sewage;
will it be the fount of truth,
this disk of the Ocean?
the sky waffles.

The metaphysics of cinema
unveils the mystery of Samsara
for us or cycle of rebirths
of the film starlets and stars 
what to imaginary characters
lend their beautiful resemblances;
you finish reprise them in a film
they come immediately you call
for a new filmic karma.
And if on a whim they throw a fit,
ripping up the contracts
sacred to the star system,
they risk finishing
their careers in Nirvana
like all us mortals.


V

Birds of an imperfect paradise
comparable to boozers
cry out terrestrial blasphemies
in their aerial obscenities,
even though Celtic priests
would have tracked down
in those obscene yelling
the unusual frequencies
of a subhuman idiom
casually impressed
in the dissimilar vocal mould.
The aristocratic series
of the royal seagull circle
above the Philharmonic
in the hunt for lyric writings,
once elect protagonists
of Contrappunto Bestiale alla Mente
per un giovedi grasso di Carnevale,
by Adriano Banchieri, 1568-1634.
Lecturers in comparative languages,
ornithologists, phonologists,
arrange the phonics
with their giraffes
in the corners of the terraces.
Seagulls coarse as Stukas
plummet in a nosedive
releasing bombs of guano
on the earthly festivities,
swapping them for a movie set
to make the Hitchcock effect real.

Youth Hostel
I

Like vast votive bonfires
summer days burned away.
The jukebox took the place
of the master of ceremonies
and from under the castle
 "Forever, love me forever"
blasted at top volume;
it was a goodbye tossed off
by girls who were heading out. 
One of them, a stranger, left me
an apple as a souvenir;
straddling the west bastion
I meditated on the halves
of said apple, cut open
oxidized brown in a flash, 
and in the meantime I thought
about graveyards of ships
not far from La Grazie,
those iron mastodons corroding
away from acidic agents.
A merchant ship caught me off-guard,
as it traversed the watercolor
and cleaved the marine canvas;
the airy wrinkles played
at tacking things together
and a precise glance
sewed up the sea again after
the boat's passing.


II

At the season's turn,
an autumnal specter
would reemerge from its tomb
and sit astride a tornado, 
sometimes a waterspout
that disturbed the coastline.
If I'd been a poet then
and not known how to be one,
I would have recited verses 
to placate Shelley's spirit.
Where it had been drowned,
the phantasm circled around
anchored, in infinite punishment.
Whenever I return to Lerici
I bring with me a new poem
but then always it ends up that I 
read him The Drunken Boat again,
and in that instant he calms down,
Arthur Rimbaud pleasing him greatly.
According to the aesthetic meter
of Napoleon the hydrographer,
interested in the seabed,
the gulf of La Spezia was
"the most beautiful port in the universe."
Since he was young he'd spun
around his rotund frame
and every other work of art
or landscape painting, in his paragon
he seemed to us anticipated
by a comparable creation.
If the port is to be expanded
we will have to move 
elsewhere with our spirits,
ask for asylum, to be submerged 
in the marine cemetery at Sete,
where Romantic spirits
are burlesqued by angels.

the woman-career
    if these fortresses are all masculine
where if I storm them I am a prisoner
I was told by one going into a career
from my body I'll make the body fallen
and be the sponge or else the zipper  
where my boss breaches the codes 
to stash me away in what he imposed
so I will being my own worst rival
be rehired in servitude near medieval
liberated at long last from liberty

• fiction by Perpetual Murray
• fiction by Krishna Ramanujan
• poetry by Yusef El Qedra
• a play by Suzanne Dottino
• fiction by Chahla Chafiq
• poetry by Ruth Madievsky
• art by Nory Steiger
• poetry by Gabriele Frasca
• Frogpondia