pause/still

It is raining in our neck of the woods. I am housebound, unnerved, unsettled, and unable to get lost in a good book.  So I sift through drawer, with the vague notion of organizing papers and other debris from past efforts. Among these I found the draft of a poem I wrote from back when we still rented video tapes:

Pause/Still

Camille Claudel hugs the marble child

she made, while Rodin lectures her



on the tyranny of feelings. He is

about to leave, for the last time, again.



He’s had it with her madness, and I

press the Pause/Still button. Given



a grace of time, so much could change.

Not for Camille, though. Her story is long over,



but I could pretended that a pause is like

a new beginning, as if there could be



another life. As if every story could be

a canary sent into the depths to test the limit



of breath in the imagination’s endless

pit. Camille is the picture



of her mother, the bitter shadow

from the movie’s beginning, grief



her vocation. Rodin standing over her,

his index finger high in the air,



cocked like a fleshy bayonet, forbidding

Camille to make any more statues



from his own personal torment. She’s lost it,

her vision that is, and keeps



sculpting the same three figures: Rodin,

his wife, and herself. Statues so small



they could fit into my cupped hands.

I push Play, and nothing has changed.



Rodin is off, he’ll die soon, and Camille,

settling for weird, will be hauled off



from the rubble of her house – her chaos nothing

like Rodin’s vast studio, that Olympian



hospital where every pain is given

its own slab of marble. Camille’s mess is dark



and shapeless as the layers of mud

she once dug from under Paris,



and is unstoppable like an artless

obsession, refusing the grace of form.