North Carolina Literature into Film
N C L R ONLINE
17
We Have Paris Box (mixed media, 111/2 x81/2 x61/4 ) by Paul Hartley, courtesy of Lee Hansley Gallery
Joan Crawford and Others by James Applewhite
An actress surviving black and white nitrate persists as hairline and cheeks in stills – more real, perfected, than when passionate breath animated her nostrils.
A snapshot of you in a wedding dress in dust on the piano doesn’t alter. Like a figure seen from a train, this stillness moves our lives along faster.
So memory understands backwardly – arrests a flicker of moving frames. A lover’s irises widen to see a child join shapes and names.
We scheme for an evening’s love-conclusion like a last-inning hit or brilliant basket, but carelessly written scenes drag on without the defining moment.
Earlier, your eyes burned intensely blue in porch dark over the velvet coat when I struck a match for the candle. Sky of all summer above the boat
Pyramids, Crusades, the Roman Empire’s sieges, holy wars and victory fires abash us in their Technicolored portrayal. Lancelot never finds the grail
aureoled you, the woman I would marry – already implicitly flanked by sons and a daughter. So love restrospectively establishes the triptych of icons.
but gets a girl. Ingrid’s eyelids, rising, outweigh elephants, airplane-wings – though the fascist director demands legions of extras, foreign lands.
But days as they change and change us Move over in sun and rain, eroding clean profile, firm chin – the seasonal process a film before editing.
Paul Hartley (1943–2009) was a professor in the School of Art and Design at ECU for thirty-seven years. Lee Hansley, who represented Hartley, honored his memory in 2010 by mounting an exhibition of works by over a hundred of Hartley’s former students. Hartley’s works are in the permanent collections of the North Carolina Museum of Art
reprinted from James Applewhite, Selected Poems, © 2005, with the permission of Duke University press
in Raleigh, the Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC-Greensboro, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, and the Greenville Museum of Art, among others. See more of Hartley’s work in NCLR 2010, 2011 and forthcoming in 2012, and on the Lee Hansley Gallery website.