Most of you probably don’t know about my poetry. I’m assembling a book of it
and feel chagrined that I haven’t done so until now. The reason I made cinema
my primary task is that I can do all of the other Arts cradled in its sinuous
arms. My eyes can luxuriate in pictures hardly imaginable even 100 years ago
when my Grandfather, Frithjof Holmboe, made his first movies as North Dakota’s
pioneer documentarian. I can collaborate with fellow artists, in a communal
sense-fest which includes all facial inputs, ears, eyes, mouth (speech) and
sometimes even the nose. Other inputs exist on other parts of the body and have
also been known to participate.

Cinema is perfect for those with a strategic mind. Not everyone can figure out
the complex four dimensional work warp which results in people and equipment
arriving at a site and committing pictures and sound to a medium. Fewer are
those who can assemble, amass, conglobate, muster, aggroup and aggregate, lump
together and otherwise fabricate rushes into something like, but never
completely identical, to a whole. If that weren’t enough even rarer are those
who can get the dough to do so, and last and most completely exceptional are
those who can sell it in the end. It almost never happens. That’s why I like
it.

But in poetry something much more personal occurs. The windy gates to the
Slipstream open and you alone are admitted, if in fact anyone gains entrance on
a given day. There are no willing helpers. No hulking tackles to eliminate
foes. There are no excuses, no scapegoats, no distractions subject to blame.
It’s you and… the universe, whatever that is. You pull out syllables, words,
phrases, verses, stanzas, rhymes and rhythms you never knew you knew, or could
imagine until the sacred NOW flows from your pen. And like all fluids which
pour through appendages, the results can vary from light and sensuous to dark
and monstrous. And other fluids appear as well from time to time.

You probably don’t know that I’m also a painter, that I have written and
performed music for some of my films. I’ve helped create small bands of
outsiders, secret societies which exist like little nation states in various
parts of the world and have flourished briefly before their purpose is
fulfilled. I’ve left ruins on many a lonely mountain promontory, and sumptuous
castles also, some of which can still be seen today.

I thank cinema for this and I thank my filmic colleagues for everything they
have done for me, far more than I could ever delineate and properly acknowledge.
The Ekiti Brothers who created THE LESSON in Nigeria, my first dramatic film,
Cine Manifest which created NORTHERN LIGHTS, winner of the Camera d’Or at
Cannes, New Front Films which created ON THE EDGE and SIGNAL 7, Snowball
Productions, (Steve and Hildy Burns,) and Alliance Films which produced, HEAT
AND SUNLIGHT, winner of the Grand Prize at Sundance, the Tenderloin Action Group
and Pacific Rim Media which created CHALK, the Tenderloin yGroup which is in the
final throes of making the 9 9 @ Night feature films with my great collaborator,
Chikara Motomura, the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking which is
currently producing PRESQUE ISLE along with Citizen Cinema our new cinematic
structure with which we hope to make 10 Films About Love, and all the above done
in concert with my oldest road dog and esteemed barrister, John Stout, and David
and Carol Richards, visionaries, fellow travelers and pavers of the road both
most traveled by and deeply grooved with memories of the fun we’ve had, the
tears we’ve shed, and the hopes still fiery and un-quenchable. And that doesn’t
even include my daughter Robindira and my son in law Robbie, who I love unto
death and the Great Beckoner Mickey Freeman and… well the rest of you know who
you are.

So, as I started to say, I’m now assembling a book of my poetry. After that
I’m going to put up a page of my paintings. The title poem of my almost
finished book and the first poem in it, is called FROM A REFUGEE OF TRISTAN DA
CUNHA. And here it is.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * *

FROM A REFUGEE OF TRISTAN DA CUNHA

What news, what clippings, what word from home
Compiled in this jungle of
nerves, my heart,
For I remember limbs concise as scissors
Spreading, I remember
your brilliant demise,
And the red clover looming in the shadow
The dark, cloven
shadow, looming. Your thighs

Broken, suddenly broken, and all the island free!
The small calves lowing,
drowning in the strange red milk
Bituminous flowers after, from the charred
socket,
Such flowers as the children would not understand.

Such brute power! A force to match our simplicity
From the deep earth, the only
foe we knew.
We waited until the last moment,
Till the very sky blossomed,
winging petals of fire,
Sulfuric dew on the rooftops. The women wept
And the
children watched, wide eyes moons and stars.

On the high cliffs we saw a horse,
Honey-flanked in the savage light,
Take fire
and fall, an arrow of red flesh,
Plunged to the sea near our bobbing boats.

Gulls spit and screamed, the cattle fell berserk
To their
knees.

But our initial loss, the screaming thrust
Which burst in her bowels like a God

Was nothing, nothing compared to this systematic
Rape, this organized butchery,
this England.

Such a race which will belabor the flesh,
Keep the channels open with whips, only that
The return road might not be quite forgotten,
Kept alive by a few, far from the glare of Buckingham.
Never seen are these priests, only this scabrous crowd,
No criminals, but those raised to be practiced upon,
Aping their keepers.

There was an innocence whose power we could recognize.
Here where the white cliffs despoil us,
Where the markets spew a language deadlier far
Than quaint old English, out of date,
We cannot see it.

Yes, we would return, all of us,
To Tristan, where she lies,
A cold corpse in the South Atlantic.
Our cattle wander the lava meadows
Grown wild, lacking the soft hands of the children.
We who have been deserted here
Would return to her, whom we have so deserted.

And I remember, swallowed by the sea,
Looking back on Tristan, her dark lesion

Spurting crimson on the boiling sea,
Remembered still, ah, the smooth, inner fronds of skin
There in the cloven forest which we explored,
How it trembled in the deep earth’s hand.

Had we ever known her, truly loved her?
For never, never, before, those brown thighs
Never had they so trembled at our caress,
Moved to meet our unpracticed, avid hands.

I see from this that none of us were lovers.
None of us had known or loved enough.

-Rob Nilsson