Meshes of the Afternoon (2nd Meditation)

“What I meant when I planned that four stride sequence was that you have to come a long way – from the very beginning of time – to kill yourself, like the first life emerging from the primeval waters.”
Maya Deren from a letter to James Card, April 19th, 1955

“…and finally, film itself, changes the widow into a bride.”
Ibid

And it may occur that, of an afternoon, these restive captives of memory – refreshed by new contexts and released by the lax discipline of sleep – may triumphantly regain the province of actuality.
Maya Deren, from 1960 “program notes”*

You can imagine the not yet
the no longer
dead shadow picks
a shadow a
shadow to begin

With subjective
shots
to begin
one desires across
time form

The form of
the shadows of
a flower - here
we begin yet
to double here

You decide
this double the
widow not yet
of ritual

No longer dead - or not
a widow any
longer when you move
when you
move with
what the shadow starts
the subject
of song to initialize

Your death not yet
not
yet a universe
for your death
and the objective
shot
the objective
of all form

For the widow to become
a bride
transfigured
key to palm
Sunday – those girls
always sung
by carol / canon
to become

Disciplines
of a weapon – in spring
time again
floating - a leap
in reverse
floating
cuts to dance form

Form Sunday
again no longer
seeing to be
seeking

With mirrors
for eyes a critical
emotion a complex
to be sung
to transfigure or
carry over
from verse to verse
inverse
mirrors for eyes

Or eyes for mirrors

Years or

A single
mirror for the
accreted
face those girls
if taking life would not be
taking life
as if at the end again
of every evolution cut
to carry across
torturous
forms the rigors
of which we are always
you are always
to take

Again no longer
seeking merely to be

Recussitated and suicided both in a dream

Is to keep dreaming and is to
no longer dream
however unwoken
by a form

The shadows
of form to pick
a flower is to recur
to all time it is to entrance
to find
entrance – the portal
of all lives

Images to pick
a key or a knife

Dynamite is no choice
emotional volitions objects
to which
the shattered the
accreted recur –
a complex

This too is experience
the occulted
bride not spoken
on film
the throat
one must imagine
broken but not slit

Are these the hells you must pass
through the mirrors through which
you shoot holes to ever be?

To keep seeking

To by necessity
be the bride
the widow
turned bride
of all these walks
cuts of life

Suicided
again in a time
not yet your own
the mirror-breath
the breath on
the mirror
in a time not yet
and again memory
nearly as inexhaustible
and shattered by
blood


*all three epigraphs from Essential Deren (Documentext, 2005), ed. Bruce McPherson