Recently I heard Henry Taylor's poem "After a Movie" read aloud by Garrison Keillor on his "Writer's Almanac" early-morning radio show. (A few days later I found the book it appears in, Understanding Fiction: Poems, 1986-1996, and had to buy it.) Taylor begins:
| The last small credits fade as house lights rise. Dazed in that radiant instant of transition, you dwindle through the lobby and out to curbside, pulling on a glove with the decisive competence of the scarred detective or his quarry. Scanning the rainlit street for taxicabs, you visualize, without looking, your image in the window of the jeweler's shop, where white hands hover above the string of luminous pearls on a faceless velvet bust. |
... and on — evoking the magical aura of heightened awareness that one sometimes gets after reading an exceptional story or glimpsing the perfect picture at the perfect moment.
Later in the same poem, Taylor's metaphors of rippling light and water recall lyrical parts of some Counting Crows songs ... and resonate with a haiku that I saw a few decades ago in, believe it or not, an undergraduate physics textbook (Waves — a volume by Frank S. Crawford in the Berkeley series):
| Brightly colored stones Vibrating in the brook-bed — Or the water is. |
TopicPoetry - TopicArt - 2001-11-15
(correlates: NightingaleFloor, SemioticArsenal, EternalInstant, ...)