Searching the Tree’s Yearnings
The Wind in the Leaves
Inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow Up”
The sound of wind in the leaves
Hypnotic
Mesmerizing
Captivating
A songbird
Soft footsteps
A hidden couple
A troupe of jesters
A murder
A pair playing tennis
A ball bouncing it’s hollow-rubber sound
Careening in all directions
The strings of a racquet send a musical response
A volley
It started
A man in white jeans snaps pictures
Reflexively
Sure of his false self
Cocksure facade of cool
Willful oblivious determination
Straight on the tracks
Runaway train tenacity
Capturing what eludes joy
On film
The moment
Stuck on the flypaper of art
Searching the tree’s yearnings
For something to save
A bottle of lost grandeur
When light gets lost in the dark sky
Piles of paper pictures
That signify some deeper meaning
In the art of walking at dusk
Starts with the open space
Around trees
Where grass huddles
Leaves cling at odd angles
Allowing light in like the slow flakes
From a cloud’s white reminder
Onto the faces of a couple
Hiding their companionship from the world
Secrets tell a good story
Behind the words
Pictures tell a good story
Behind what happened
Heavy black Chelsea boots
Run towards and away
He never hides his presence
Squatting leaning bending
Photographs into the private world
The woman objects
Chases him
Arms waving
Bites the hand holding the camera
Her peace invaded
She stumbled into the light
Into the frame
Into the world
The wind rustles the trees
The leaves calling
Afraid to contact their neighbor
All of them
Hundreds
Collectively
In unison
Beyond control
Rubbing and massaging against each other
With high-pitched gentle friction
Elegantly touching
Vibrantly veined
Leaf to leaf
Barely, imperceptibly touching
Consensual attitudes of interruption
Guided by breezes
Winds hold sway
Branches bend and flex coaxing and recruiting
Leaves above and below
To join the chorus
Soft jazz plays along
A soundtrack of misunderstanding
She tries to pull his camera away
He captures the part she fervently hides
Pictures steal part of her away
Into the public domain of opinion
The songbirds sit astride the wind
To sing above
Insolent human manners
Forlorn birds climb their pitch above
Outnumbered by the tree’s rush of slivered sounds
The leave’s vociferous lyrical musculature
Strangling into life
The sprout of perverse desires
An incessant feverish rustling
Follows him back to the studio
The sounds of wind and leaves
Are in the pictures now
Film bathed in the darkness
Of blackening leaves inside sound
Capturing what hides behind the sound
Inside of celluloid
Inside the black olive
When the dark oils of night
Survive the savage disarray
Where wind flies into a blackbird’s wings
Combing the sky for night’s diamond stars
Soon he develops his pictures
Bathes his art in
The pool of her clandestine actions
She comes to see him
And they watch each other
The solution hatches surreal evidence
False ideas grow out of diabolical enlargements
Always surrounded by a chorus
A pavilion of sounds
At home in the fiber of speculation
It all grows louder
More kinetic
Wind instructing leaves
Photographs enlarge into a new storm
Growing sounds crescendo
Where art mimics murder
A body grows in the imagined horizon
Photographs transform to abstract art
Coaxing thoughts awry
Mobilizing them
Towards a great insurrection
He runs back to the open spaces
Searches for what he saw
As the picture grew larger and larger
Bathed in the studio of imagination
A dead body appeared
Behind the profile of the secret girl
Fixed together by the celluloid
Arms and photons
A stick figure shed by dreams
Hoping to live in daylight
Running and seeking
The body dashed back to ether
Only rustlings and gray-light starlings
With precious sounds
Soon to die
As wind diminishes to a whisper
No one notices….
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