That indelible image (6.2.21)

A project idea came up during our regularly scheduled Wednesdays@One salon: writing from an indelible image.

Every so often, we encounter an image that (to us if not to others) is so striking, that touches us somewhere so deeply, that it lingers in our minds, sometimes permanently.  This is what lay behind the opening passages of John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman - an image out of which (according to Fowles) an entire novel grew:

But where the telescopist would have been at sea himself was with the other figure on that somber, curving mole.  It stood right at the seawardmost end, apparently leaning against an old cannon barrel upended as a bollard.  Its clothes were black.  The wind moved them, but the figure stood motionless, staring, staring out to sea, more like a living memorial to the drowned, a figure from myth, than any proper fragment of the petty provincial day.

It's an image that may not be terribly arresting for me or you, but that captures the imagination of the narrator of the story to unfold over the next nearly 500 pages of text.  

I wrote the poem that follows many, many years ago from a similar experience, though a vastly different kind of prompt: a dead fly on a bright white windowsill.  Here's the poem . . .

No Sign of Struggle

Remember that final moment in Blade Runner when Rutger Hauer,
playing the renegade cyborg, bows his head and dies, run out of battery,
gently after so much terror, and gives up his ghost—a white pigeon
from a nail-pierced hand—gives it to the black, acid rain of the future.
Extraordinary, such a death after that life of terrifying, angstless freedom.
 
Then to witness this little death on the sill of a south-facing window,
mid-afternoon in February with a foot of snow cleanly fallen just beyond,
a black fly on brilliant white, its wings broad and flat casting a wedge
of shadow beside the haired body fixed in feeding or self-cleaning
or, if nature granted such a thing, a moment of knowing, last thought
 
happening who knows when, an instant ago or in the cold fore-noon
but happening as large and finally as on the roof-edge of the movie screen,
when just as certainly this machine seized, stopped, stiffened into place
for its eternity, as if eternity would be given it for having lived awhile
in this space, however long and strong its life-cord, its moment . . .
 
How Hamlet-like, eaves-dropping on death’s ghostly aftermath
(I kneel in reading glasses for a closer look) with a heat register knocking
its confirming knell in another part of the house—machine for machine.
No rage, no rejection, no rush to embrace, either, but with big questions
forming: angstless freedom?  Is this what you want?  Are you sure?

Well, it was two images, really, that made this poem . . . the one from the movie, the one on the windowsill.  They both remain with me today, because of the context . . . I had recently seen the movie; and I was alone in a room on a bright day after heavy snowfall the night before.  They didn't coalesce into this poem automatically or at once.  But they drifted into each other, as it were, like boats in a current, and became forever inseparable, bound by the theme of death and ideas of freedom, fate, and nature.  

So our project?  Search your data banks for just such an image, something that will serve to launch a poem.  Your poem needn't - in fact shouldn't - be "about" the image, that is, merely a description of something you've witnessed.  Instead, the image should provide a kind of gateway to other things, like a rumination or reverie on Life, Death, Eating Breakfast, Snoring, Friendship, Loss, New Love, Uncertainty, God . . . well, maybe not that last one.  Let's not get carried away!  The image you work with need not be from long ago at all.  It could be something you saw, heard, smelled, tasted, felt in Whole Foods the other day.  But it should be "intense," in the sense of indelible on your consciousness.