John McCully

Not the gear but rather the poetics.

Now friends, I have no idea if posting this contravenes any USA copyright law, or other USA rule as I don’t live there. If so I apologise. I live in New Zealand where, anyway, the rules are really only suggestions, when you come to get to know everyone. Corruptions is endemic here.

Be that as it may this poem was published in the New Yorker online recently so I’m assuming as it’s out there it’s OK; in other words that’s what Don Paterson, the author, wants. If I’m out of line please delete, Chris, whomever.

I find this text delightful. As I read I hear music, involuntarily reach for a camera, the film look is a given.

The bottom line of this poem is sublime.

How to shoot that!


Rain
by Don Paterson May 26, 2008

I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;

one long thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone
beside a silent telephone
or the dress lies ruined on the grass
or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source
along their fatal watercourse.
However bad or overlong
such a film can do no wrong,

so when his native twang shows through
or when the boom dips into view
or when her speech starts to betray
its adaptation from the play,

I think to when we opened cold
on a rain-dark gutter, running gold
with the neon of a drugstore sign,
and I’d read into its blazing line:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood—
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters.