“Film Studies” and Other Poems

The Ordering of Vision

From one room to the next, the Pompeian red
walls offset a single object. 

There is a brush stroke of water and there, 
a terra cotta vase. 

The gods reach for one another like ropes
flung across a gully, touching

not flesh, but air. 
The fruit seizes light 

like a face behind a window. 
The eye is an organ of knowing. 

Film Studies

In Hans Bollongier’s 1639 painting Still Life
with Flowers, anemones, roses, 

carnations, and tulips burst
from a globular, glass vase, 

each flower cut from a different season. 
The frame contains a collapsing

of time, which is to say a montage
without movement. 

This is also cinema,  
painting with light, 

the petals red and off-white
as radicchio. 

The Storm

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe
in my own goodness,

only that the feeling was fleeting,
rising up out of me like a storm

chasing a margin of light.

For years I’ve walked toward forgiveness
beneath these bright eruptions. 

In time, I’ll come to the mountain pass. 
Step through the green door of rain. 

Datum

Lorraine Daston claimed the modern fact
was a thing,

as in, a nugget of experience. 
We grasp that the proliferation of knowledge

is not just held
but lived 

in the body as both 
verb, and being. 

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Hannah Bonner is the author of Another Woman (EastOver Press, 2024).

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