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WIND SONG’ is a production of AmpMediaProject.com
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse …
~ T.S. Eliot from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’
Words and Video by Douglas John Imbrogno
I first came upon the line ‘decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse‘ in 1975, in the epic tune “Time Waits for No One,” by the great art-rock band Ambrosia. I am unsure how I came to know that this eclectic, whip-smart band had cribbed the line from T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ But it just made the band even cooler to me. This, then, is an ambling re-introduction to ‘Wind Song,’ which I hereby have transformed from an art-music video to an art-music-video-poem. The revised video is ‘a decision and revision‘ which I hope I won’t again reverse.
I first posted the video — sans poem or verbiage — atop my recent publication of the prose-poem ‘Lost Girl Elegy. I was thinking to experiment with the notion of pairing an original video with an original poem. Now, I don’t think that combination much works. It is asking too much to view a separate 4-minute video and then to consume a longish prose-poem. They are two different art forms, besides, and deserve their own separate attention spans.
A shot of the Huffman Prairie Flying Field flag video in a stiller moment. | april2024 | thestoryisthething.com photo
I shot the ‘Wind Song’ footage after witnessing the April 8, 2024, full solar eclipse at Huffman Prairie Flying Field near Dayton. The National Historic Landmark site is where the Wright Brothers developed the Wright Flyer III, considered to be the world’s first practical airplane.
So, after the cosmic solar eclipse experience, I wandered over to one of the seven flags that mark the prairie’s perimeter, struck by the flag’s solitary beauty. I later crafted a video of it whipping in the breeze and paired it with a gorgeous and moody soundtrack, “Erast” by Blue Dot Sessions, along with ambient noise from the eclipse crowd. Even as I set the video atop ‘Lost Girl Elegy,’ I noted how the white spaces and sky-fields around the flag might lend themselves to a video poem of the sort I’ve experimented with in recent years. (See some at this Youtube link.)
The short poem that I have now overlaid on my multi-angle flag footage is perhaps a little more revealing a piece than I normally publish. Maybe a cri di couer for the particular passing moment in life it captures. Or, as the poet James Baker Hall says to poets and sufferers in ‘Praeder’s Letters,’ if there is intensity in any part of your life ‘make a formal complaint.’ P.S. And for those who won’t stay around until a video concludes, here is the full poem below.
WIND SONG
by Douglas John Imbrogno
The Spring wind feels like cool silk,
undulating across my cheek
this mid-day of my loneliness.
When what I most require,
navigating sunlit miles from
here to the city’s other side,
is just that kind of best friend
who listens like a monk or
old tree. Not prescribing nor
enjoining what besets you,
whose quiet mien is itself
the gravitas this hurt requires.
I’m missing a best friend,
right now, this instance in my life,
the one you cry to when
rumination churns a riptide.
So, I turn into the wind, today,
alone. And wait it out.
Listening to the distance, for
the sound of footfalls this way.
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