Notes for a Screenplay

A Work in Progress 
4 

 

Gods were watching who’d win a game of chess, 

in a peaceful Parisian scene below

where sunlight weft its way through plane trees 

pruned to perfect a harmonious light.

an impressionist scene they both thought to say,

watching through windowpanes against their bed

which slipped and slid losing its bedspread,

as they enacted their improvised one-act play.

Sunlight slotted by slanted wood blinds,

shadows painted on a mottled white wall,

hands moving pieces driven by minds,

that probed that parried chess pieces stood tall,

there where they saw them bathed in light below,

Dionysian light such as gods would sow.

 

Then, there and then, when coexistence twined

their eyes engaging passing on the stairs

when he realized composing those lines

vines might climb together never be one

when they exchanged bright words for brief seconds

enough time to enthrall that morning when

a trout stirred for a naiad in the fronds

her image firmly embedded in him

when he saw her in Springtime on those stairs

forever rising upwards till time’s end

kept en prise captivated held so still

put your fingers on your temples find it

where in memory they’ll always exist

a portal to paradise entered in bliss

 

She was nineteen, he was eleven years older,

Aphrodite personified as Babette.

She told how she climbed stairs in Denny Hall

for a tryst with her poetry professor.

I climbed those stairs ninety-four years later,

for classes with Classics Professor James J

Clauss, who also taught cinema and drama,

who gave me an A for a paper that

imagined Glenn Hughes using Catullus'

poem on the marriage of Thetis and Peleus

and the tale of Theseus and Ariadne

to teach a screenplay class about Paris

with Babette meeting Aldington and H.D.

I remember the Sixties and Let It Be.

 

When times were good before that first world war

they rehearsed their honeymoon in Capri,

watching blooms licked wildly by honey bees,

embracing in moonlight living their law.

They got married when he was twenty-one,

it was not so happy as once before,

their child stillborn with nothing to be done.

He joined the Army to face disaster,

in gas mask fighting for France thinking Greek.

Came home not to a warm marital bed,

French poxed by death lacking courtesy,

telling H.D. of Arabella's allure.

When I think of Aldington and H.D. 

I think of the Sixties and Let It Be

 

Let us seek Medea, 

where the sun rises but doesn't set 

where the eye goes on forever never finding

where Medea vanished in the end

like peering back in literary time 

past incunabula that survived,

watching fragments of parchment

scattered by the breeze

vanish down

dry

drought ridden gutters

 

 

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                    2025