Skip Fox, "Blood in Black and White"

“Blood” somehow always invokes, in itself, a crisis beyond itself. My blood, your blood, her blood, our blood. Bloodflow and bloodfeud. And what could convey such a crisis of red better than black and white—even the ecstatic scarlet is devoured, pulled into some sort of (always poorly comprehended) contest. Skip catches this (whether he wanted to or not) perfectly, the crisis invoked most directly in “living the cinematic trope” (a great film title: Centrifuge of Blood—in vivid B & W!). There are buzzing, blooming metatexts—a booming rush—all over this thing, all lurching from a sense of urgency, married to a sense of incompletion, the pitiful shock of en français, etc.: pointedness of ferret’s tooth, spurring on of dolphins, those non-fish in/out of water, literal arguments and tropes assuming the forms of dreams or movies, everything plunging, pulsing, pouring, everything—because of everything—stunned among visions that won’t resolve into something as simple as “immediate,” or “mediated.” (JM)

     Blood in Black and White

5:53 a.m with weather en français (Channel 3) says

it's going to rain through the end of the week, five

days ringing in the changes, wind in the rigging, my

operation always "incomplete," I walk away stunned,

amazed, while slashing the upper regions, as movie runs,

masts in dismay. En français, indeed. Fucking in a foreign

language for instance. I just want to see you again, says the blind

man. Plunging into horror of falling water. Days lost, nights beyond

intent. Arguments raking the sides of dolphins with toy-sized

spurs, sharp as ferrets' teeth. You can barely see them beneath

the many-sided darkness stuccoed with wraith light, rising

and falling from sight amid gusts as a ghastly strobe marks

their passing back into storm-tosst seas as you approach, a lens,

thoughtless, yet pregnant with attention as a bell with fruit, you can

almost make out the fine lines of blood that appear to be pulsing

from the multiple and intricate serrations along their sides, lightly

glazing their torsos until they plunge once more into wave and foam,

disappearing all over again. An old movie, a scene from a recurrent

dream, or living the cinematic trope for an ancient and unconsidered

insistence upon what does not exist in the face of the booming rush

of each day. Blood becomes us, sea on which we bob, our season's

flood, this morning strands of water falling from eave to trough

beneath, ringing with proto-syllables, plunging deeper each day.

Skip Fox has written a number of books of poetry. Next year, Lavender Ink will publish his wired to zone, a novel.