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