The Shadow Line (Noir illuminations from all mediums)

[mkhand]

You can never know too much about the shadow line
and the people who walk it.

- Raymond Chandler (the Long Goodbye)

the darkest mirror extends inwards
for at least a thousand years. Believe me
there are no fairy tales of insomnia,
no escape from the thumbprint of darkness.

-poet Edward Hirsch

Well I saw you last night down on the avenue
Your face was in the shadows but I knew that it was you
You were standing in the doorway out of the rain
You didn't answer when I called out your name
You just turned and you looked away
Like just another stranger
Waitin to get blown away

-Bruce Springstein Point Blank fr The River lp

Noir sensibilities appear in many forms, what's in your "Gem" collection?

-Mike Handley

[mkhand]

The long tube of the silencer turns toward me.
I consider the finger on the trigger,
the sound like somebody coughing
upstairs in an old building
and now the single bullet
suspended in the air between us.

You could ask: But what did I expect?
And I would have to say: Only this
Nothing but this.

-Lawrence Raab (From his poem The Assassians Fatal Error)

... the power to penetrate
the dusk of distances and the darkness
of corners, to resolve back into their innocence
the treacheries of uncertain light,
the evil-looking forms taken in the gloom
by mere shadows, by accidents of air,
by shifting effects of perspective. ...

-Henry James (The Jolly Corner)

If you think good things are on the way
And the world will improve, don't hold your breath.
Just go to the graveyard and ask around.

-poet Mark Strand fr Some Last Words

[mkhand]

Death is a very small room in which to hide a body.

-Elizabeth Spires

Nothing falls right
in these shadow times
Like sprung clocks
or fizzled bulbs
we appear hopelessly intact
only our insides are wrong

-Nicholas Chistopher

Love is not always blind. It may
see just enough to prefer the dark.

-R.D. Laing

One's favorite films are one's unlived lives,
one's hopes, fears, libido. They constitue
a magic mirror, their shadowy forms
are woven from one's shadow selves,
one's limbo loves ...

-Raymond Durgnat

I want to rise so high that when I shit
I wont miss anybody.

-William Gass

[mkhand]

distilled night, things indistinguisable, invisible as all the shadows that
a person walking sees clinging about, packed in the fragile daytime,
collected now all together, edge held to edge, ganged up into a single face,
a single barrel point. We have spent our lives lighting up the night
and failed.
-Alberto Rios

Where black is the color
Where none is the number

Aint no use in turnin on your light
That light I never knowed
Aint no use in turnin on your light
I'm on the dark side of the road

Now everything's a little upside down
as a matter of fact the wheels have stopped
What's good is bad
What's bad is good
You'll find out when you reach the top
You're on the bottom

In a city of darkness there's no need of the sun

-Bob Dylan

when we enter darkness
we give up the light
but when we enter the light some of us
carry a little piece of darkness with us
and will not let it go
we are children of the night

-Richard Shelton

[mkhand]

i was screamin let me outa here before i was even born!

-Richard Hell (and the Voidoids)

There are men in this city who labor dawn after dawn
to sell me my death.

-James Wright

There are as many ways of being dead
as there are ways of dying

-Richard Shelton

Look around. Is there enough light left
for you to make your next mistake?

-Jonathon Aaron

[mkhand]

Every minute
has its secret corridors
leading to dark rooms

-Exaterina Yosifova

i keep telling myself i will
feel better tomorrow
but i don't believe it
there's always tomorrow night

-Richard Shelton

In hollows
in the small vacumns of touch
between skin and skin

there
o there
the dark ground out our loneliness

-Don Thompson

i feel my hair bristle with fear
for invaribly in the face of death
what terrifies most is
that almost nothing has happened

-Tomaz Jastrum


From here even the end of the line
Is not far enough away

-John N. Morris

[mkhand]

The John Alton Aesthetic

Our best estimate is that there is about 5 times as much
Dark Matter as there is Luminous Matter, making our visible
universe a thin frosting on a Dark Matter cake.
-Don Lincoln

If I can see, it's only because it is dark.
-Melvin Bell

There is a crack in everything
that's how the light gets in
- Leonard Cohen

[mkhand]

The Fallguy's Lament:

I didn't go down
the floor came up on me!

-boxer Kevin Pompey

Life
is gravity dragging all together
the sparkiest eye the delicate breast
the sly hand the harsh laugh ...

If there were humor left in this sweet band
it would raise its drying voice and shout
Knowing most are deaf GOING DOWN!

But no one says a word so we wait
nodding fungily for someone
to press our number

- Peter Meinke

... consider nightfall.
In relation to the light we have, consider it final-
Still falling from the night before
With ourselves inside it like ore in the igneous dark

What happens is that nothing happens.
What happens is we fall so far
Into a sleep so manifold
Not even nightfall, whose gold we are, can find us.

-James Galvin

[mkhand]

SOLITUDES
crowded with loneliness

-bob kaufman

loneliness ... is a condition
of seeing clearly.

And life is guilty, the enchanted place
where trivial hopes overshadow
great longings.

-Ekaterina Yosifova

When i was lonely, i thought of death.
When i thought of death, i was lonely.

-Jon Anderson

The man with everything
looks down the barrel of his gun
which is loneliness. And the homeless
wrapped in newspapers on the heating grates
know exactly what money will buy.
Let happiness follow if it can.

-Lawrance Raab

Arms in the small light
trying to hold
on to the skin
of our seperate dark

-Shirley Kaufman

[mkhand]

...SOLITUDE, you haunt me ...

-Eddie Delang - Irving Mills

ONE is the loneliest number.

-Harry Nilsson

In darkness
my solitude fits like fabric,
tailored to last forever.

-Danial Halpern

From your neighbor
the night divides you,
and from yourself.

-Jon Anderson

and as we live numbered days, believe
there's safety in numbers
when you remember
the number's one.

-Danial Halpern

[mkhand]

Upon entering into Autumn ...



how can it be so late all at once?

- W.S. Merwin

no one thought badly of the future
or they found other ways
to remind themselves
of what they would have to get used to
because it was going, or gone
and there was nothing they could do about it.

-Lawrance Raab

... i was never able to
make anything stand still.
And now the days slip past as if
they want to leave me behind,

- Shirley Kaufman

The days last
as long as they can, and the darkness grows
from behind the trees and houses.

-Danial Halpern

Nothing stays anymore
between my ten fingers

- Pierre Reverdy

Even a leaf prepares
for its fall

- Eugene Ruggles

[mkhand]

THE FALLGUY'S LAMENT cont.

and the earth will slip from under one
and one shall fall with one's eyes on heaven

-Pascal

where the sinkholes are waiting.

-Shirley Kaufman

These are the raptures of falling in space forever ... .. .

Out of a cloud i came falling into a cloud . .. ...

-Jon Anderson

youve hooked your wagon to a falling star
might as well enjoy the plummet!

-Wanda Coleman

... and maybe there will be
after all,
some slack and perfectly balanced
blind and rough place, finally
in the deep and green and utterly motionless pools
after
all that
falling?

-Mary Oliver

the back of my dreams has been broken.

-Patricia Hampl

Love spills out my ears at night
while i lie there alone.

-Robert Blake

[mkhand]

Solstice: on the way to the Darkest Day ...

Kiss your loved ones. Night is coming.

-Michael Ryan

when the night flies on with us into itself

-W.S. Merwin

... the future is here. It already
regrets what hasn't begun to happen.

-Shirley Kaufman

... nothing happens, or, more precisley, does not happen.
Nothing is everywhere doing what nothing does,
which is to expand the dark.

-Mark Strand

In places my abyss
goes scarely skin deep,
and nowhere, I think,
deeper than a grave.

-John Haag

fall face down upon the knot of pain
which seems to make the simplest things
a complete and frightening mystery

-Andre Codrescu

the invisible conflagration could be
the light we see by
when we close our eyes in the dark

-Don Thompson

[dlhartzog]

I think these are really cool, they strike at the heart of films noir, which, in the end, are really all about death.

[mkhand]

Glad you enjoy them! Ive been collecting these "Gems" (lines i wish id written! concerning my own similar obsessive themes and images) for over 30 years, and realized the back alley had the perfect walls to display them!

[mkhand]

Sunday Sermonette:

When God first said Let there be light
He meant it would not be dark for Him.

-Nathan Zach

NightLight be my guide
I can feel the way just so far.

-Stephen Dunn

Heres the natural gospel of it all.
All systems tower and collapse, and we
babble in darkness, seeking foundations
for other reconstructions, knowing all
along that what works always is nothing.

-David Bottoms

No shadow to hide in
Every mean little trick exposed
Just as I make it over the fence
The terrible radiance finding me out.

-Shirley Kaufman

If you make hell, plunge to the bottom
heaven is in sight there. Everything circles round.

-Sander Weores

Speaking into darkness is the closest I come to prayer.

-David Bottoms

Enjoy your life
Whether you like it or not.

-Shirley Kaufman

[mkhand]

Noir Koans?

We bury ourselves to get high.

-David Bottoms

When a man dies
he loses his will to live.

-Ferenc Juhasz

There are few things left to take
from a dying man.

-Piere Reverdy

Where we are is only where we have been.

-Shirley Kaufman

At night
The dark is darkest.

-Nathan Zach

Light's not
the only illumination

-John Haag

Night is a world lit
by itself.

-Antonio Porchio

there never is no light
... even when light is gone.

-James Turnell

the sun illumines the night,
it does not turn it into light.

-Antonio Porchio

I seem to see more when
I cannot see ...

-Shirley Kaufman

[mkhand]

That driving ambition, that gnawing appetite, the constant craving ... more than any empty hand can grab ... DESIRE

Sometimes from wanting too long
A man hears the impeccable cry from inside
That all life he knows goes wrong

-Michael Ryan

Whether it is better to spend a life
Not knowing what you want
Or to spend a life knowing exactly what you want
and that you will never have it

-Richard Shelton

I have trained myself in idleness and want
My days are spent reaching for shadows.

-David Ignatow

We do not recieve what we want
until we learn
what we are willing to give up for it

-Richard Shelton

when I get to one side
what I want next is on the other

-Shirley Kaufman

still there is something running
and I can't catch it
I am always behind.

-Andre Codrescu

I've learned to wait. Nothing
we want is ever worth
what we go through to get it,
and the difference between what
little we have to offer
and how much we're asked to pay
is life, a kind of debt
we always owe somebody.
I'm in no hurry to pay it.

-Richard Shelton

No one gets over his desire.

-Michael Ryan