Arielle Greenberg for National Poetry Month
APRIL 28, 2007 Listen to this Story
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Each weekend in April, Weekend America has been paying homage to National Poetry Month. Arielle Greenberg's poem was inspired by an independent film she heard about but never saw. Greenberg shares her poem "Stag Movie."
"Stag Movie" by Arielle Greenberg
I have never had the pleasure of being shown the film in which the hart,
somewhat crazed and gilded (I mean his antlers touched
by fairies, I mean delight of and in the sadness of the hunter
who must be borne to kill his passage in the fullness of his
being), fleetly tears through spindled forests of his Creator's
stolen diary, nightly; I've never seen the script which, I've been told,
like a diary, has hearts peering through the thick craft-paper pages,
and sprinkles of glued-on glitter, dictionaries, cut-out stencils,
and each page a master painting, a labor of crazed true love on the part
of the hunter (who employed animals like actors because she was from
a country where they speak the tongue of shadowed trees, taught in
little one-room schools that perch on frozen lakes like ice-fishing huts year-round,
a black country, with black trees, blacker days, one swollen midnight sun a year);
but when the will o' wisps glow in that night (inside the film that can't
be seen by me [the film in which a chase is shot abstractly through the specter
of the desperate wearing sadness of the deer who is hunter, hunted, hunting,
mounting terror with his pack] because it is so spooled and black and curling
in someone's attic language, spooky lair, or archive), they glow even hazed
but all the whiter, brighter, silver, in my city garden picnic, the dark moment
that I'm being told by strangers who will seduce me, try to impress me, kiss me
full as wine and almost miss my mouth under arbor that bears no fruit or ivy,
as I'm only being told about the diary of the storyboard of the foreign,
abstract movie of the secret mournful qualities of the adult, raging hart.
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