-
Stand-In Invocation
- Callaloo
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 25, Number 4, Fall 2002
- p. 1027
- 10.1353/cal.2002.0165
- Article
- Additional Information
Callaloo 25.4 (2002) 1028-1033
[Access article in PDF]
Chromatic Sequences
Ed Roberson
1
Form in early movies flickering
leaves in the outline of the canopycolor lost as if each
leaf alight were a dart of flame offgreen gone ashen to the eye
each leaf a page smoke the distanceeach page has come
is: the haze ofhistory in steps
each past raising its shade of dust each veil
the distancethe movements
of time and form as one tree after the other tilting
further
the eye watches
the thin air but sees the windwith no evidence
but in this frame sequence a taken fading
i
but time a taken fading [End Page 1028]
2
we were not seeing movement
the frames put the leaf
each time in a different place than
we remember seeing it before
we were not seeing movement
the frames were slower
than we could ignore
what looked like time were measurestaken: there was no movement through them
we were seeing it was only seeing we saw
alive
About the trees bending as a seeing
of the wind:I use this sighting all the time
but see the wind as clearly no clearer there
in its footstepssee no more appearance than
the look of movementsee its alias the invisible
filmed man but have
only a crushing of snow afootSuch passing for nothing
such crushing of surface, mountain quarries into
cities such crunching of pastinto this moment
we see everything moving out of
sight [End Page 1029]
3 (Chromatic Spatiality)
Recall the car, the eight people cramped inside,
the large landscapes of talk and
excitements often in the wrong
lanes opened by faith and innocence,
both in which we innocently had so little
faith, proceeding through the closing openings
in traffic just in time.
Beside the road,
recall someone had set the sapling
of a small willow in
the huge space eventually
its grace would take,
and how the color of it that spring
already filled
The spaces of color more than simple
aerial perspective
- those waves layering
to less distinction each color to that blue
so barely seen it's clearly some place else -go in other directions, create
even other separations
than heaven and earth.
i.e., the increase of intensity in that
direction towards me (as well as) the closer tome if me (= / here
is a color also depicts location and place
here
in this country. [End Page 1030]4 (1948: Art and Third Grade)
Closely observed realities gain ground
over religious and classical subjects
Most have a hard-edged horizon near the middle
Not much to balance one at a time but togetherextremely uncertain as resolution vertiginous
All kinds of smart alignments and blind pairingsEarliest of those purely observed what
I felt only myself see by the third grade
was meat in the butcher shop pig's feet
the skins looked like my seat partner's handand I felt this sadness for her she was ugly and
she wasn't supposed to be being white
it was my secret that I could see it
as meat and supposed to be s'pose to be really looked at
A single voicethis stray singing,
the vocal lineof an assembled
unthinking,from which the eerie anarchy
of it allderives a solitude. [End Page 1031]
5 ( advance )
In this latitude the leaves
are more beautiful shot
from their trees. The objectto secure the movement of
artillery lines also lines clearly forwarded as
coverage, news. The art of engravingrecords a Civil War sniper the leaves edited out
taken out in the leave in/ leave out of working the metal:
he is drawn hit through his cover,a foliage transparent to the picture
as well as to the shooter.This picture, the double plate printing,
important page in journalism,
exposes in the line betweenthe two, the limitations
on size for newsplate at that time; the piece
together of seeing, of what is printing and what isimportant A line
which would disappear in the appearance
of photography as newer news, as more...