THE KEY IS WHERE YOU THOUGHT IT WAS (ON LOCATION IN PALESCON)

“It’s a path walked backward, with choices and rejections, mistakes, interpolations, that fatally lead him to the origin of composition, that is to say the very composition.” Robert Bresson

To G, M, and M

From memory, in a place of forgetting, where no book is not suffering from mildew. And pseudo glued together pages.

So memory has a purpose after all.

Even if it’s forgetfulness.

A latest bid for something different to listen to on the playlistyou asked me not to open until I began to crack

from the numbing number of buses, jumbo-jets, requisitioned private planes, taxis, ferries—and if your luck holds out—mules

it takes to reach Palescon.

~Our friend “who’s away from his desk…but checks in with internet caves”

tends to nix the explicit. If he hadn’t made it possible for us to meet at a moment when we could actually talk—to—each other—

I wouldn’t have found a friend and a woman to design interiors

and stay beside for the city segment of this briefest of all [anti] jungle epics, Twilight: Palescon,

that—it will eventually dawn on the audience—merge,

from what I’ve seen of the rushes, in a way that turnsopposition into concord, especially when the vegetation

begins to become one with your naturally unnatural substances.

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(Sorry, I think I hear a knock on the door, more like a tap…?)

~

SHAKE IT OFF

(I fear I’ve strayed.Nervous about the way he looked at me afterwards.

Glad he had the savvy to return to his grotto before dawn

and the paws of some creature I would die to bring homerips the sheet from my skin and propels this woman’s body

into the shower where I use soap laced with pumice to remove the love part

and awaken—as myself again: the perpetually trembling director of disturbing and impossible films.

And without question this outtake should open

with chords from the rehearsals of “I’m Only Sleeping”because the subtext would inevitably be

“get out of bed Sandrine, remember the mantra”:

First at breakfast, first on the set, last off.

Change and change and change.

Is there one

women’s magazine that doesn’t restate the case

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that “a woman still has to do three times as much as a manto prove she’s ‘equal in the workplace.’” An

assumption that reinforces the negation it’s trying to negate.

I know that behind my back the boys comment not on my “worth” –but hotness quotient: “and she’s in her 50’s!”

If I’m still cute, why do they think I’m deaf?

Maybe I overheard it. Ok, I overheard it.Sounds carry in Palescon, walking to the set at dawn.

~

(Michel’s visit to his mother.)

Jeanne: I have the key. I’ll let you in.Michel: Who are you?Jeanne: Jeanne, a neighbor…

Pickpocket

If initials were enough for Dupin to find where the cruel and vengeful

“Minister D’ had hidden the incriminating letter, they’re…:the case of the purloined letter is the key.

The keys I left at home in the early afternoon

are merely physical; and I knew someone would be herewhen I got back…or if not, that I could get it.

But there may have been keys in Poe’s story.

But not the jangling that punctured my sleepafter Fortunato locks Montresor in the wine cellar, forever.

(“Don’t forget the falseness is in his mind.

We see the other’s falseness with the clarity that blinds.Blind always to ourselves.”)

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~

“MODERN LIBRARY EDITION”

The copy of Poe’s works at the Hotel Palescon is in the mildewed beyond.Every letter just barely, not even that, discernible

to the naked eye. And what use would the most radical of the anamorphic

lenses I had chosen to catch the horizontal spaces of the jungle,with actors positioned at the furthest end,

wandering in and out of the frame—the flame—some destined

not to be seen again, like the former explorersWho set the stage for a journey into…or not into

any maelstrom or ancient magical tribe.

A search into lost time, but a different order of recoveryis in order; possibly. Trying to explain this transposition

of space and time has proved—: I don’t think it can be done.

DELIGHT

[2

Stillness broken only by the raucous cries of the macaws,And howler monkeys scrambling in the cieba trees.

Nights without power: the fireflies take over.

I wonder how many have followed their trail to an undesired end.

The aqueducts in Palesconrival those of the Romans.

Tired of pretending.

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\\\]\\nOU DON’T CARE (SAID LEVIN TO STEFAN)

Scarcely knew my set designer in charge of exteriors

until we had a long aimless afternoon just to scout locationsand who looked utterly unlike the image she projected earlierwhen she let her long hair fall to her waist and donned

a mid-thigh tee shirt…hacking our way through the brush

with blade whetted machetes, and never once, failing, to uncoversomething miraculous, which the sun struck with full locution;

as if it had been placed there with the sun in mind.

Queasiness. Refusal to admit to myself how shifty, seductive and unpredictable Palescon is as now

there’s something unnatural in the sun’s focus on the totems.

~ FLASHBACK ~

PAYBACK: MY ASSISTANT IS A WOMAN

The first nights Carolyn and I had no choice but to share a bed so wide the hotel must have reversed King and Queen,

just as they hadn’t noticed the indefinite check out dates for several

couples at loose ends, who chose now to check out “the shoot.”Now I notice these lines in the brochure are lightly strewn with penciled in comments.

“The Hotel Palescon [II] boasts three [outdoor] swimming pools, [under strict insect surveillance] four tennis courts dispersed over 400 acres, a squash court, exercise areas indoors and out. [one manually operated sand-encrusted treadmill on wooden rollers] Every room has a view over an area that still retains its mystery. WARNING: Don’t be deceived by cleared paths. It doesn’t mean that the surrounding jungle has been excavated, or purged of the unknown and the unnamed, as every day new treasures [terrors] come to light in Palescon!

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Look to all four sides at reasonable intervals. The animals on the property may appear tame; friendly; don’t be deceived: if they’re not in the hotel, they’re wild.” [Turn page over.]

Bougainvillea: a front for wisteria.A garden of discarded bricks provides a fine course

for lizards and chameleons to escape and come back.

Repeat the pattern.

Something vast, like the floor in a tent the stars pour through recklessly,creating, I shouldn’t say it, matrices? broken roads, forked paths, and no end

of signs. I would have made the trip even if I’d known new affinities would arise.

(Sorry, dark flash, this guy I dumped some months ago,if I said that he would have asked how I knew

with a tone of demeaning innuendo. Snot. Maybe all these concepts

and the assumptions drawn thoughtless and automatic have becomeuseless, retrograde, but the believers would hang on, no way

that juggernaut isn’t there to give relief; it’s there to—

the way the Aztecs cut off the head of the victor.Does the fascination with “ball” precede creation?

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M:

Mention of the bed sizes brought back how you called Descheplin’s film Kings and Queen, King and Queen, as if the “s” made you stutter over painful implications sensed. Precipitant. You loved the film, but found the tacit degeneracy, or insufficiency, of the characters who would be the Kings, you sensed, only in their own minds; and the question of the Queen’s intentionality, distressing. You hated the hiddenness. Not of the film. Of the central characters trapped within the script. The way the father disguises his hatred of his daughter during his life, and spells it out in a diary entry he knows she’ll read after he’s dead.

My sketchbook opens to something I copied from one of M’s lunatic letters, cursed by a painfully sane sense of reality’s reality, which is resistance: “Kings and Queen, now that hit something in another dimension re point of view, I thought,

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did you?”

Any occasion, he’ll take, as the leaping off point—for—and I find that what my pencil’s sketched—in the impossible quiet of the night—darkens and takes on at the center of a lose human form a kind of gravity that pulls my eye further in. This gradual focus allows me the freedom to leave out any encompassing shots of the overall situation. But at times you can see the three layers, almost horrific in their symmetry, of the ruin’s arena, the massed jungle, and beyond at a sharp angle the mountain which the eye climbs until it hits water and senses the nearness of the waterfalls before shadows from the two volcanoes, one active, one dormant, perched there,

that reflects the tension that the couple throw over the other people they interact with tothe script, in the environment—and of it in a way I never could have predicted.

~

BALL

Now no one can say it’s about gender, this object—

which with its perfect roundness and various degrees of density, size, toughness—can be gripped when dimpled but not grasped because it’s always moving, losing air, a

replacement appears the instant the one before loses its bounce, Lebron

James, not hovering, not looking at the basket when he jumps back-wards to get a clear shot; defenders swarming, but Lebron

envisions only this sexy net, and the rim that stretches, swells and then

grows beyond measure, and shot after shot pours through, and the beautyis in the trajectory of each shot and in that it does not end, once

the ball clears the net.

~

I haven’t mentioned the moths. Cumbersome buzz bombs that caused us to…splat.Fly swatters like tennis racquets. The buzz sounds that brought

Berlin and London to Palescon. The blitz, the happiest times in the lives

of people like Graham Greene, suffer less when danger is externalized.(Note for soundtrack: “License To Kill,” often subliminal, slide guitar,

disconnected castanets, and sand and gravel in a bucket for a drum).

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Is it clear now, that looking at women’s naked bodies is in essence one-dimensional?—No not women’s bodies, the body parts, separated, fetishized,

like the American family since WWII. What fun could have been had—?

Doesn’t M come to this fallout shelter with Pocahontas in an early childhood scene—?A devious move to reenact a meeting between himself and Madelaine

that never happened…? Why should he and not the rest of us find true love

at ten—in concrete boxes if the people in charge said it was “ok” for us to pretendthat until an attack they were like underground tents,

with tons of Cool Whip, Kool Aid, Yoo-Hoo—even if the product

hadn’t been conceived yet in what’s known as real time—Tang, Spam, Carnation [the powdered milk], Chicken of the Sea (bought in bulk,

“We cannot guarantee pure “tuna,”) Campbell’s Chicken Vegetable, Bean

with Bacon…Cheez-Its, frozen foods of choice (except TV dinners because tests have shown that if refugees have no reception

they might even experience symptoms of mild depression

or explode) and what substance, what molecule, binds these items together if noSALT (and that will rid the overcrowded underground cells of anyone

with hypertension in one stroke) and other fun stuff we, even we, could replace

before any possible attack unless it happened before the dayafter. Men think that after the earth is destroyed, along

with their “music,” lap dancers, and other toys, that the music will last,

and they’ll always be granted a listen. So what do you do?About the question of nothing and men. Reality and men.

Illuminations…you and I, the ha-ha natural or man made?

And the restless Carolyn talking in her sleep, throwing off moreand more sheet in the airless damp and shapeless night—

despite the languid rotations of the beautiful and useless

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propeller fan on the ceiling: we all know what the guys would make of it.Men sustained by the eternal fantasy of a threesome

where the addition of the second woman is never less than

a source in endless, inexhaustible, fascination.Until the spell is broken when he witnesses how happy the two women

make each other, oblivious to presence, once he’s spent…

Changing the ways other people think is a theme most absent from Woman with Parrot.And yet this sudden stabbing pain in the gut makes me admit

I’m jealous, despite the negative connotations, that no one’s ever called me

incorrigible; while the word’s been hurled at M so often he’s learnedto anticipate: to duck. They’re always ready to hit on the stark

contrast between us, on insufficient grounds, “you’re so opposite!”

The word different would be enough. That last minute invitationto one of Derrida’s last seminars, before an intimate class of five-

hundred students and guests such as I and Mei-Mei.

Never have I appreciated the subtle shading of his mantrasuntil now: first difference; then the trace.

Matrices are one of those words I get mixed up.

And the second “I” in prairie I always leave out.

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SANDRINE’S SECOND DISPATCH

When I’m in the visual field it’s all separate then it blends; it meshes.And being in the bush was like being in the weave.

Late in the day. None of us anticipated so rich an excursion.

I wonder if one totem doesn’t “point” to another, and if there isn’ta pattern. If it were the case, it would have to be low light

to see it, a glow that you could make out in the maize.

Tomorrow I’ll have time to check out the enchanting areas we can espy through the 50X7 Steiner binoculars

as if the land had been cultivated, the ha-ha’s deviously set down….

In the space that’s been cleared to reveal more of the site’s secretswhose interest for me is not in the predictably – slitted eyes of the totems –

breathing time away from the entourage of—

And now, rain, crack of thunder, more rain and…I left PolandSpring Water off the list of salt-infested survival stockpile.

Subliminal memory of a system of wells? Or where the Mayans were

building an underworld, attackers could never detect.Tell me, G, or should I ask Dupin, is there a chance

that someone will pick up on the portent I intend?

Surely…not a diagram, I was about to write. A diagram might be the way to do the titles but it would tip off what I want to get at.

Which will soon be, after a week in Palescon,

mixed in with an itch I’ll want to scratch. Scratch “a week.” I write as if time were itself here

in the jungle, where within a mile of the Hotel Palescon itself,

there are uncared for, undivulged palatial estates the government could…

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Scratch “could.” Why do I argue against myself? The last thing…

I’d wish for is for electric fences—cattle prod to the human touch—

to be strung around Palescon’s ruins. As I take imaginary aim at the tour bus which has pulled up beside my set!

They won’t stay at this low key “eco-hotel” which would rather leave

rooms empty than let them out to tourists who would protest the liquid ripple effect of the rain on the corrugated roofs.

It is sultry as hell and I am sick. At heart. I don’t want to explain.

But when I delve into the brush to unearth images I find myself falling into your arms, not trapped, enwrapped,

and it was good for a day to wrap myself in the jungle’s ness.

~

During these last two interminable vigils, wanting to sleep, wanting not to sleep,

waiting for an inaudible knock on the door,

and wishing the wind would pick upand turn this pulseless atmosphere around; turn the variegated jungle into a carousel,

while I lie here alone, divided, the window half open, half closed, and slams shut at least once a day of its own distilled malicious volition.

But how could it not, being witness to the devouring green thickets, brush, and bush the actors’ machete’s, freshlywhetted each day by the macheteros, can scarcely penetrate;

and now that I've used that word, I know that I can't escape...  But I will remain myself. I came here to make my filmin this particular jungle, if for no particular reason,

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Uxmal, Tikal, and Sayil might have worked as well….

And while our three consultant-guides—mad established,bearing resumes the way Quetzalcoatl bore feathers in his headdress

and too academic to ask to be paid—have begun

to find a kind of alternative universe in the evolving pattern as to where the Mayans placed these markers

it’s been our luck to uncover almost every day, for the future to recognize the past…?

I'll stick with the script I've sketched. The one about being alive and human in a place shorn

to minimal degree of all familiar comfort and convenience

Americans take for granted. I hope none of them slips on the stepsin some interminable descent of a yet to be accessed palace.

Feathers, resumes. Let them garner what credentials they will. “Bubble

Reputation,” I can’t resist, given how truly it defines a condition that has no intention of disappearing

Long after we're gone.

Is this a plus, a minus, or: you got it.

~

But everything is not relative! Subjective experience, yes.The future hurtling toward the past and wrestling our being in the instant, yes.

Who killed whom…: yes and again yes. Someone had to have done the deed, no?

But the perception of reality can’t be fixed, any more than Smithsoncould have kept the Spiral Jetty above water had his—panic!—

Single-engine Cessna not gone down while he surveyed Amarillo Ramp

from the height necessary for any clear view. There’s an artist: Someone we can learn from even through the disappearance of their works;

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like the fragments of Sappho and Archilichos and Heraclitus.

If only I, you, we, could absorb that this element of isolation is inseparable from us and our environment, we, you, and I, could dissolve all this useless

self-critical bullshit that creates that mass of Perfectionists when nothing

that exists in time knows perfection. But in the instant that just passed something inexplicable happens: a backward chain is wrought.

~

I hadn’t known, when I’d begun, that my missionwas to recover duration; it was never a mission

but I chose to keep the word in the line to stress Mission.

Lloyd Cole’s song “Down on Mission Street” could be woven in,the place, missions, environments that somehow contribute

to dwelling within, along with the interminable approach

to the threshold, where the phrase passes through the wanderer’s mindtoo quickly to be remembered, “there is only the sky,”

redeems all the small markers men have placed to guide

the eyes of those who come after to the encompassing dome,which now appears gently sketched in charcoal,

and will soon take on the hardness of an impenetrable fact

carved onto the canvas with a palette knife by Courbetin a mountain crevice in the Jura

until the light is gone and he lights his pipe and makes a bet

with himself as to which is closer—though the dark posesno problem to the native who’d imbibed the region—

Montpellier or home.

Jura, Montpellier enticing, yet unseductive words that call upan entire environment, whether or not you know what they’re like.

I first learned about the Jura mountains looking at Courbet,

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when the words murmured aloud brought rills, waterfalls,swimming holes, and chalky cliffs and the rocks set off a paralyzing green

constellated on the hills that broke open to the next horizons

just as the feel of being in the valley beganto oppress. Another bower, where the danger lies in never leaving.

~

Cut to Brooklin, Maine, Joseph and Trudi had rented a house for a monthand less than a hectic week later sped off with desperate fervor waving

from a red convertible with white bucket seats: “Too much green!”

I knew what he meant. They hadn’t brought a cat to bring offerings of freshly killed rabbits, purring like a bellows in Dolby,

to offset the breathings in the woods, or the chances that bears, entire

families, dropped in unannounced. But there was also abundanceof bays, and islands with their own quarries and trails

beside which grew chanterelles and delicate white pipestem flowers.

~

I don’t think it’s us, we’ve been through that a—times before—It’s the environment that’s thrown us under the same roofless roof again,

like the night we camped on your lawn just shy of the ditch

when I came to visit in Chicago Heights. Did we know, we knew, how out of…—It was for parents to let a boy and a girl develop a friendship

over time and space, and the key, I’ve got it now!

Is that—I’d wager—that they didn’t give it a thought.Not until we were out of our teens when we were forced

to face, but that wasn’t a fraction as awful as the same situation

replayed on a loop. Blake’s Los tireless at his forge. You still have your wife and I’ve had my—men.

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None without qualities to recommend.

But I doubt you’d say about her what I think about them:that their qualities never came together to make up a…whole person.

Difficulties are part of it. And you stay by her side

because she wouldn’t let you tamper with the courseshe had set; not the switch from computer science to mathematics,

but the woman inside the woman you love to be inside.

~

O god I see the nightmare of a man now, what’s the dif, and I’d let him in and it was ok until

our eyes could not flee our eyes and the ambient noise

had extinguished itself and, I’d look at the clock and countthe hours before I could slip out without a fight.

A filmmaker always has a shoot; a poet a poem to write.

Or the dream of a book that would be an environmentof its own, in which people could somehow

live, even if they couldn’t, if they took it in a literal minded way.

Sad only suicides see the future hurtling toward themin time to step on the tracks.

~

This PS is for your wife’s eyes, thanks.O the comfort of writing a letter to the people

dearest to you that will never be mailed!

One of the actors isn’t what he seems.I think he’s…younger…keep you posted.

And don’t mind the errors I made a point not

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to correct, art is not about being right.The mail goes out you won’t believe twice weekly!

And the single-engine Cessna isn’t much bigger—or louder—

than some of the birds whose wing spans cause my cameramanto revert to his first language: “très formidable.”

Thank God I chose Tohoscope (2.35:1)—yet the width of so many things

not in ruins still exceeds the sleek horizontal frame.And so an update is—could be—isn’t—in order.

It’s as if someone taught him how to touch me.

Not where. But how. He had the pressure down to a…I bit my tongue. NC-17. I didn’t want my groans

to usurp less intimate gossip in the blogs.

Which even the deepest friendships cannot fill,unless you’re profound like Ms. Always Right, who offers,

“It’s only a month at most, right, so you don’t have to give it

to the guy who looks good because he’s the only guy in town.”And I thought: guy, town, abstinence, desire, sex:

why will the words of an invasive cretin stick and gnaw?

She just plays the oracle. Like your father. To live a life is not just to cross a meadow, but to stammer and shake

through the minefield always on your periphery.

~It’s not that it’s 3AM, or the intravenous tequila after the day’s end Margarita.Or the wind whose tastes I could not quite identify.

It’s that—don’t let this take you down!—the struggle that leaves you wrung

after a day when you’re forced to introduce minutia and keep yourattention on the whole at all times; a day when a fit of pique

at an “interruption” would prove you’re not the “man” for the job.

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Ok, ok, a little self amusement in this room where there’s nothingthat isn’t wilting—and ears tilted in case there’s another quasi imperceptible “knock”

on the door. I just hope he doesn’t think he has to improve on the ruse

of not sleeping. Hey, you’re in touch, why wasn’t “I’m Only Sleeping” released on Revolver when it came out?

Hell, a question like that just might be my way out of the film.

In terms of. End of the unending. Mark and I have begun to enjoyhacking out enormous chunks of excellent footage, picturesque, yet austere

that adds precious minutes, and isn’t absolutely integral.

Perks aside, I wish I still practiced an art where the constraints were utterly those of art and not audience. “Audience.”

Wait. Daniel just flopped on the bed

exhausted yet intent on upping his performance.Other than his being an actor, I haven’t found anything

to ridicule and revile him for yet; too tired to shower after the shoot

he smells of…either the savannah or God, you choose.I await: gossip. And news about how M and M are making out

since M returned from hospital after her hip replacement.

I hope she doesn’t fear he somehow thinks her less beautiful because of the scar.Or is that inevitable, in the way that just

like a woman is inevitable, though neither he nor I

ever liked that song. Mark says it’s begun to bug himthat people think he’s putting them on when he goes against

an overwhelming consensus.

Say hi, no, a hug, if you run into the monster.I can’t imagine he’s himself at this time. But usually,

out of suffering words cannot relate, metamorphoses occur.

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~

RE: YOUR QUANDRY ON LOCATION IN PALESCON

You have to keep the actors on point, undistracted by the overly specific “advisors,” (who you ought to have done without), not wondering what other ruins they might uncover, what secrets about the Mayans they might reveal; but they have found, after hacking through the high matted grass which is of such a piece it looks like the earth before any humans began to turn its resources into dwellings and food sources to say nothing of weapons or “ball!”

The characters find the totems scrutable, the slitted eyes, tilt of the nose and lips parted, to evoke surprise—point toward the next totem in the series that leads to...? Only the search. The actors, leaning on shovels between takes to keep from dropping in the heat, trapped between the jungle and the mountain, the horizonless distance, speculate on the usual crap apart from your script: treasures, the kind that glitter; and stuff of whose value they haven’t a clue, where the Mayans I think were more in search of more impalpable—but not impractical—forms of enlightenment, or illumination.

Who knows? The crew goes on hacking through tall wet thickets with machetes.

But even in your imagined scenario the crew rebels and wants to go on uncovering ruins even when it’s enough for the purposes of the film.

Like children—as actors are.So we love them – insofar – as they love themselves.

If you don’t believe it, interview a mirror.

S: Gotcha.

~

Of moments I let the camera running while I ranoff, not so much to pee alone unseen in the impenetrable,

ghastly and benign thickets…sigh.

Hell, maybe I mean family. M’s was unutterable.Catastrophic. Mine was small. I’m not sure

I’ve admitted to myself they’re gone.

Except for other once young relatives who I’ll see at the reunionno one has yet mentioned—until now.

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I just looked out. Moonlight dispersed in patterns that disturb.

The swirling grays and yellows, all mixed up, nopattern, no, no natural expressionist gesture, just

the seacoasts of a thoughtless universe we’ve imbued with…

I don’t want to finish the sentence. They’ll think I’ve become soft.After that I will. The word that followed “with”

was “love.”

Endlessly rendered in recognizable forms.Almost never taken in the way Freud took a man’s

response to coincidence: “I don’t want to look.”

Ever known a woman who thinks like that?A woman, I mean, who wasn’t an actor.

Daniel said he loved “The Look of Love.”

(Probably thinks Diana Krall wrote it and made it known.)The proof was on his iPod: we shared earphones; that’s how it started.

If I return from this blankety blankety without

any incurable blankety blanks I think I’ll make a film—I like to start with the title—called either

or, or—say G if I often forget the second

whatever in a sequence does it mean I have some kind of something I can use to excuse

what I fail to accomplish?

There’s that knock. Open door: iPod, with mini-speakers this time around, the song we were, and now can listen to,

together, one dance, it’ll help us get to sleep;

whatever this is it makes “dancing close”the euphemism of the past century yo.

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This tension! Will it save or destroy?

Is this the time? He refuses to press but it growsand I can’t resist the frisson, a tingle

merely, given the interference of unlined sweat

pants and, fuck, nothing underneath;but he values his job and I think let’s add

this moment to the next time we have real time.

But will I lie awake wondering what he’s…and will I too feel…compelled…: no

the sticky heat isn’t an excuse; it’s an answer.

There’ll be intervals. Letwhatever is between us

build.

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Note: The narrator is Sandrine Laurent, a poet and independent filmmaker, now in her 50’s, and also an immensely worldly woman who knows many of the significant artists (poets, painters, filmmakers) of our era. Her success is continuing to make “unsuccessful” (from a profit point of view) films while staying her course has led her to focus her attention on this visual art which fascinates her precisely because it’s entirely external and her goal is to show the spirit through the body’s involuntary movements and unrehearsed “talking.” She is addressing three people, one at a time, or all three together, depending on the section. She and Mark have known each other since early childhood and have something slightly resembling a sibling or kissing cousin relationship, and at this point in their lives they can tell each other everything, as they say. She’s inspired by her new friendship with “G,” Grace, a woman who designs interiors and works with a man-made but ecologically sensitive material called laminar. The other M, Madelaine, is Mark’s wife, with whom she’s also evolved an intimate friendship.

Sandrine is shooting a film named after a painting by Courbet, Woman With Parrot. This change of title from The Dig caused a lot of grumbling among some backers, down the line to distributors. She is intractable. There are six “leads,” three men and three women. Two, Roland and Perdita, are a couple. Their mercurial relationship sparks something like a Midsummer Night’s Dream madness on the others, who fall in and out of love with Roland and Perdita, in part because they’re unaware of the existential and energetic implications of the bond between the married couple. They’re blind to the invisible tension inherent in the nature of things. And too preoccupied to begin to process what effect being on a dig in Palescon might have on them. Most of the poems concerning Sandrine are portraits of a woman in action. She intends “The Key Is Where You Thought It Was,” as a poem despite her announcement that it’s a letter she will never mail. Thinking of it as a casual exercise enables her to create.

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