Cressida: An Isle Quartet


umbra

joy starts in the cool sunless corner and it lingers over the body because the light's imperial privilege is all this remaining landscape: a square well cupped by a blue-tin protector, then the sandy fore-yard where a palmetto bed thrives, robust green hues compete against each before the bed itself is lost to the rest of the view--the orange grove, trumped by the royal blue sky itself--its blue is bottomed out by rolling nimbus-- here the inherent imbalance of vision is measured by the clouds & then comes back to the cool sunless corner where Cressida stands in a light-slashed palm shadow—she's a luxury ranch-hand herself--in white jeans, comet-boots, brown leather vest, a tan earned far from umbra, her sun-kiss won from a beach and sunny cove on the other side of earth---but here, she stands to become the intersection of arrival & rest: go on, her eyes encourage yours, vanish into the fore-yard, run the yard‚s sun-bleached steps & have the courage to lose yourself sooner than you'd like, in an ether of ever-after, given instinct, her eyes suggest, I'll follow your going: we'll make haste slowly, pass by laborers busy butchering the mangrove trees, razed for the regime of the glare's unforgiving blaze.

sunstone

this grove, likely sacred for long-dead purposes we'll never know, no matter how long busy diggers excavate what isn't there—Cressida's content with the abandoned stone, jutted ledge & sooty dirt ambience of ruin, here in a pocket just beyond the beach--a moss & weather-wracked temple--so in love with present intensities she's uncurious about the unfathomable past & respectfully sits at the off-center of her own image--barefoot, at peace among the remains of some god's portico, the sides of her feet dusted by attractive particles--gray, brown & crystal sands--a glittering slipper the spirit let go, like the temple's ghost trees & its faithful who are lost to shambles of belief, left without a capital of martyrs--these believers absconded the isle before the armada of language-makers arrived & choked the harbour & stabbed the virgin dunes with their colorful cloth-bearing spears, striking stakes on behalf of the rulers: all those know-better thinkers worlds away from what they claim.

blanche

if white's the absence of colour then what presence conflates itself with the dragon-fish outburst & imploding rainbow-after-nature? these ruptured flagons spill yellows, orange & blues which roil in the once-white seat where Cressida plays out her copper-toned dishabille, clad only in a white balloon blouse, bordered by floral panels, the dark yellow rays that give rise to pale yellow exempla of petals: as the white does for the pink, so it does for the blue & even the ivory warp & weave of the wicker seatback suggests white is the precise answer to the question so few ask: what colour is that light borne skein of absence, that absence that‚s neither calm nor busy, neither muted nor sheer, yet is so perfectly neutral it can hardly be described as no-thing?

flosculus

leave the politics of silk outdoors to die like a salt-coated slug in a patch of sun by the crazy path & come inside the glass room of the thatched villa, here to feel how much silk reveals by its concealing--check out Cressida's play-hood, which is a black hand-me-down throw from some former princess: see how the silk marks the circumference of her coffee-coloured pupils, see how it spells out a welcome-bow above fern-like rushes that seem to be forever taking shape over her black screen: a flesh-colored silk finger guides its own inside out: sweet flosculus pressed to let the seer (her self) in on that recess which gives more rewards for each touch, then the black paints the legs in those sun-shot hues unparalleled in the named universe, unspeakable for what they do to the nerves, those cells reserved for logical functions get to know how subtly subtraction quickens the heart & makes way for the paradox of an addition that takes precisely all its given.


© Tim Keane 2005