Carpet Circles and Winter Mornings

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Carpet Circles and Winter Mornings

after Kelly Moffett

 

What to replace the emptiness. You

knew.

Another collected blame like gazing crystals.

 

Your morning shower came before “good morning,” before

“Want coffee?” and before I ever did.

 

I loved the prismatic bursts before my eyes,

your silhouette through the curtain

leaning forward to shave, head bowed. Prayer

fogged upon the mirror.

 

Then the usual hurried talk:

“Coffee’s ready” and “Where are my keys?”

 

I found an affinity for candlemaking. For you–

auto mechanics, smudging.

 

And I preferred darker places,

Rooms and hallways shrinking.

 

You would have liked this waterfall.

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Weathering

I’m fascinated by Motion Poetry–the poet has an unprecedented opportunity to assert control over the speed at which a reader moves through the poem, but at the same time (assuming music accompanies the video) is constrained by attention to the relationship between the words and the music.

This is my first attempt at a motion poem, using one of my poems from Beneath Artificial Stars. The program used was VideoScribe by Sparkol, and I found it a fairly simple WYSIWYG interface, which was exactly what I needed for my first stab at this sort of thing. The music is one of their stock songs.

The photo with the water tower is in my home town, and is in fact the view from my parents’ back yard. The graveyard is at the end of a gravel lane on the farm where I grew up.