(a poem in progress)
I
Daylight.
Every thing is visible with a small shadow that attends below it. This is the city, we are told. This is the world.
On the center of this world is a woman in a tower.
And since she is in a tower, she is helpless.
The blue sky is the background used to heighten
Her sadness. We can see the clouds threatening.
She lifts her delicate hand and wipes a tear about to fall.
In the distance, the thunder of hooves. On the horse is a man.
We can say he is a knight even if his face is open to the wind.
He sees the woman in the tower which is an inevitable act
the way a pulley carries the weight of water to the surface.
But there is nothing yet in the scene that suggests a narrative.
So enter point-of-view.
So enter perspective.
We see the dust that has clung to his pants as he descends from his horse which is brown.
We now start asking questions: Would he save her? But first, would he touch her?
He rushes to the stairs with a blur called The Past. The woman is waiting.
She is locked here by what she does not know and now they are touching.
The enemies are not yet revealed which is a way to conceal a tragic ending.
Now is their gaze from which we assume that their hearts beat a little faster.
The sound is always late when lightning cracks. They are yet to speak.
II
How do we define a metaphor?
The first scene is obviously a metaphor. It is made to represent something else.
The contemporary does not respond to this metaphor.
A woman in a tower and a man on a horse make us think of the word medieval.
But the mind seeks a metaphor because it contains a truth we can place from one timeframe to another.
Even the gaze of the man and the woman elicits in us a certain response.
The scene progesses now into an image which is familiar.
The man and woman change their costume, change their exaggerated hairstyle and now sit side by side on a
bus.
Zoom out: the streets are clogged with cars. The buildings make you think of a series of dominoes about to fall. And then you remember tears.
Zoom in: the man and the woman are talking, their shoulders touching. They are chasing each other down in the corridor of language
which is another way of saying they are flirting.
Their bodies lean toward each other, like the tips of two cards, as the bus breaks into a screeching halt in front of a stoplight. Four people and a dog cross the pedestrian lane.
The dog is an added detail.
But the kiss is not
which happened so fast,
you
didn’t
even
hear
it.
Montage Vol. 6 • August 2002
