Daily Poem: Cinéma Vérité ~ Dorothy Walters
Cinéma Vérité
~ Dorothy Walters
This road is so fuzzy
it is sometimes hard to know
whether we are moving
or it is moving under us,
the scenery jerked along behind
like the sets of an old movie;
Time Passes.
Obviously, we are dressed for a journey.
The crude map is in our fist.
The air is heavy, like water,
Forms sometimes flash by like fishes,
too fast to tell whether they are
other travelers heading toward a common destination,
or aborted versions of ourself
that somehow floated free
in an earlier episode.
Before, there was sequence and measure,
A small fist unrolled to a recognizable hand,
blooded and veined,
Spring was to the right,
while on the left
snow crusted the curling branches,
winter always coming on.
Here, all things reflect each other,
The sun scorches the night sky.
The old man playing the organ in the country church
is also the girl strolling in the garden.
Mixed twins wander in circles overhead,
arm in arm,
but you cannot tell the female from the male.
Nearby, a body thuds heavily down,
a corpse imprinting the dust.
Instantly, a thousand roses spring from his brow.
You watch unmoved.
You cannot say if your composure
is the calm of acceptance of the mask of a dulled heart.
You move on,
muttering old benedictions
as you go.
