TRAVEL POEM
Bresson
By now, Ricky Ian Gordon is, like, the WONDERLUST Poet Laureate…
Here are his most recent poems for us “Keys”, “Antonioni”, and “The Sand Hill Cranes”.
This one is a homage to the immortal French director Robert Bresson.
Bresson
(With thanks to Albert Camus)
A pair of shoes.
The brisk ascent
Up the stairs
Of a hurried shuffle,
And clip clop.
The terrace doors
Wide open,
Still swing.
The shoes
Rush outside.
A silk scarf
Floats indifferently
On a breeze,
While below,
Face down,
On the sidewalk,
Blood seeps
From the head
Of an unidentified woman.
Hushed onlookers
Stare.
*
Elsewhere,
On a crowded train
A fleet hand
Enters the pocket
Of a stranger
Removing its contents.
*
A crisp bill, counterfeit,
Enters the hands,
Of a student with debt,
Causing catastrophe.
*
An outcast girl,
As if playing,
Deliberately rolls herself
Down a hillside,
Splashes into a river,
And drowns.
*
A prisoner
Scratches himself
Out of a jail-cell
With the stem
Of a broken spoon,
And shimmies
Down the wall
With sheets
He has braided.
*
A country priest,
Blighted by
Stomach cancer,
Sustains himself
On bread
And water,
Preaching
Into the darkness.
*
A Knight’s armor
Rattles.
*
Joan’s pyre
Still smokes.
*
The Bateau Mouche
Lights the Seine
Like a behemoth.
*
A man, but barely,
Unable to make peace
With the felled trees,
The flock in the abattoir,
The battered baby seal,
The festering air,
Or the poisoned water,
Pays a friend
Needing money
For drugs,
To shoot him
In a cemetery.
*
While a donkey,
An ass
On a flowering hilltop,
Surrounded by sheep,
Brays,
Then collapses
From abuse
And exhaustion
In a grotesque parody
Of the crucifixion.
