Shades of Paradise: Romantic Film Noir

John Martin (1789-1854) - The Plains of Heaven
1851 - Oil on canvas - Tate Gallery, London
Source: Wikimedia Commons - Google Art Project

Arriving in Paradise Valley

After The Plains of Heaven, John Martin, Oil on canvas, ca. 1851

James Hart

Painting The Plains of Heaven, John Martin

imagined a purely Romantic setting, a feathery wave

of girls adorned in gowns of gossamer and gauze

drifting up God’s flower crowned slopes,

ghostly maidens adrift in radiant nature.

Stretching beyond them as far as his perspective

allows, a valley’s sapphire lake filled by falling heavenly

river, a distant mountain held in diaphanous clouds’

embrace.  Such settings suit his antique mind

once honed on biblical visions.  Martin claimed his

revelation beheld a new heaven and a new earth,

evidence the aim of art should immortalize

nature’s impossible immensities, capture one man’s

reverent heaven.  For my own thoughts today,

I’d just as soon see a fictional scene by Edward Hopper,

a touch of American realism in shades of film noir.

Supplicants and petitioners, all arrive by train

at the edge of heaven.  A brooding gray mansion

waits beyond ominous gates to receive them.  The dead

step down from luxurious Pullman Palace cars,

amble toward the station suffused in sunset red.

A sign overhead proclaims Paradise Valley, landscape

beyond the town fulfills desert promises prophets

saw centuries ago in Moses’ own wild west show.

Right about now, someone cues a soundtrack

for this scene: a man whistles on the evening wind,

Eastwood’s eyes survey the good, the bad, and the ugly,

each of them freed from darkness the living dream.

January 23, 2012

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) - The House by the Railroad
1925 - Oil on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, New York
Source: WikiPaintings - Visual Art Encyclopedia

To Mark a May Snowstorm in Missouri

Nature's Cuneiform: Bird Tracks and Gravel in Snow

The last time

 it snowed in May

in northern Missouri

was in 1907.

Snow fell abundantly

on Brookfield, Missouri

on May 3, 2013.

Reading by Intaglio

James Hart

Some words are easily read

in the world’s curt cuneiform

like bird tracks in the snow,

or the faint scrawlings of a worm

showing my bones where I’ll go

as well as alphabets of lead.

Such words mean no harm,

nor do I read them so—

not even ink knows it’s dead

yet educating in the page’s glow,

nor names know upon a tablet’s bed

they teach us by a rigid Roman form.

This is language of the long ago

if we discern lessons of the dead

are as mute as Grecian marble herms

incised by time’s letters uncorrupted,

muddied scribbles of random worms

no more valedictory than tiny y’s in snow.

(Poem from an unpublished manuscript

entitled Somewhere West of Never)

Bird Cuneiform: "...tiny y's in snow"

From Such Fallowness Imagination Soars

Roy C. Andrews. Classroom, ca.1911.

University of Oregon Photograph Collection

Teaching by Nature

James Hart

"it's spring and the goat-footed

baloonMan whistles far and wee" 

~ "in Just"  by e. e. cummings

We construe autumn lessons for you,

share yellow notes of leaves we carry

here from time’s college of the soul,

geese's check marks on far margins

of the sky, old familiar words we say

year in year out like whiskered frost

x-ing over text on pages in dead grass.

We chalk desire’s lush verbal phrases

across winter’s bleak squeaky board,

sometimes our participles dangle ice

in our minds, time’s vague antecedents

waiting to be clarified like sky as years

settle in powdery drifts across the floor

if your custodial ears will not hear us.

Class, I hope you’re all taking notes:

you join fragments to hapless clauses

and discern when to let your sentences

run on beyond black night’s horizons;

you learn to scan context from the stars

and know, like Cummings, when to void

punctuation’s rules, and feel green buds

sprout poetry in goats and barren souls.

(Poem from unpublished manuscript

entitled Somewhere West of Never)

Sky Writing in Long Symmetrical Lines

Geese / Standard V Flight Formation

Geese Too Many to Number

James Hart

Sometimes destiny

writes itself in long sentences across the sky,

migration’s clustered alphabets

forming

            scattered

                        words I begin

                                    to understand, yet

have no tongue

to speak the syntax of distant wings

diagraming gray clouds’ grammar,

the chill

            of late

                        winter air still

                                    a skillful murmur

I also comprehend

as, open-mouthed, I stand

looking up in muted awe

at couplets

            slipping

                        into quatrains

                                    of sky and poetry,

nature’s black diction rhyming one immutable law

scripted

            there in lines

                        of shifting

                                    symmetry.

(Poem from unpublished manuscript

entitled Somewhere West of Never)

To Be the Light of Rubies, Sapphires

The Judgment of Paris.
Italy. Second half of the 16th century.
Cameo. Chalcedony—onyx, gold. 3.0 × 3.6 cm.
Inv. No. К 2438.
Saint-Petersburg,
The State Hermitage Muse

Sleeping Khalkedon

Dreams of Corundum

James Hart

If I were a globe of sleeping ice,

I’d choose to wear the snow,

become chalcedony under silica pose,

and by the night’s white devices

I’d don the moon’s surplice

and make my melancholy glow.

I’d linger in this crystal place

until just before the dawn

I’d be some pale deceptive stone

berthed in rose and amethyst hues,

maybe a carnelian with a purple surplus,

a moonstone face undone by ruby tones.

By such mysticism’s throes,

I’d be both alchemist and prize,

something ivory with facets for my eyes,

perhaps a mounting at the crux of cross

like an effigy of bones evolving Tudor rose,

quelling time’s economy, both igneous and ice.

(Poem from unpublished manuscript

entitled Somewhere West of Never)

Corundum / Sapphires

Echoes from the Death of Roland

Bremen Roland : Statue of Roland
in the market square of Bremen, Germany

Dream of the Dead Airman

James Hart

For nearly sixty dark unhallowed years

only my bones draped my empty distance

in sarcophagus of cargo and its broken gears,

dog-tagged in wreckage I once knew as France,

my name enduring slow particle bombardments

of long compression into forgetful foreign soil,

and one ghost in my memory’s machine haunts

me always, roiling smoke and glaring flaring oil.

At last I’m wrapped in time’s unflagging glory

and carried across my homeland’s common field

to rest to Taps and muted eulogies as they bury

me now in Ozarks like Arcadia, my fate revealed

among remembered hills like echoes of a long ago

where soldier ghosts and poets sang of Roncevaux.

(Poem from an unpublished manuscript

entitled Somewhere West of Never)

Bremen Roland is a famous statue of Roland in the market square, or Rathausplatz, of Bremen, Germany. Roland was a knight of the first Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, and a hero of the Battle of Roncevaux Pass, in which he died. Roland became a paladin of Charlemagne’s court, one of twelve warriors found in French literature’s Matter of France.

Roland stands in the center of the town, next to the town hall and the city cathedral. The statue depicts Roland as the protector of the city, as he valiantly holds a sword and a shield with the two-headed Imperial eagle, a symbol of Germany. The shield is inscribed with a declaration translating to: “I manifest your freedom, as granted to this city by Charlemagne and many other rulers. For this, be thankful to God, that is my counsel.”

The Bremen Roland statue is a symbol for freedom and market rights, thus his location is adjacent to the marketplace. 

Battle Monument - Roncevaux

If Night Were a Black Goddess Named Cathedral

Venus of Willendorf - ca. 24000 BC

The Venus of Willendorf, now known in academia as the Woman of Willendorf, is an 11 cm (4.3 in) high statuette of a female figure estimated to have been made between 24,000 and 22,000 BCE. It was found in 1908 by a workman named Johann Veran (or Josef Veram) during excavations conducted by archaeologists Josef Szombathy, Hugo Obermaier and Josef Bayer at apaleolithic site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria near the city of Krems. It is carved from an oolitic limestone that is not local to the area, and tinted with red ochre. The "Venus of Willendorf" is now in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria.

Several similar statuettes and other forms of art have been discovered, and they are collectively referred to as Venus figurines, although they pre-date the mythological figure of Venus by millennia. -Wikipedia

Thoughts on Naming

a Black Woman Cathedral,

the Goddess of Willendorf,

and the Primeval Mother

James Hart

Her soul will be your soul, your rose windows

in the dawns you call your eyes, opening slow

and following days’ specters assembling sunlight,

saints and martyrs on the western front of night.

She needs no edifice more ponderous than clouds,

a canyon landscape for a nave will do, and floods

of starlight stippling night’s ancient slated dome,

stone penitents draped in veils in her votive home.

And for her icon, carve your own paleolithic Venus

like Our Lady of Lespugue, ivory idol of pendulous

breasts, mounded belly full with child, hips ample

enough for lands to drift upon, oceans flow to pull

of moonlight in her prayers, her labor’s rhythms

in dithyrambic wind, heft of heaven’s natal hymns.

(Poem from an unpublished manuscript

entitled Somewhere West of Never)

Venus of Lespugue - ca. 24000 BC