the first vision

A stranger has come

To share my room in the house not right in the head,

A girl mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.

Strait in the mazed bed

She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,

At large as the dead,

Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed

Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,

Possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust

Yet raves at her will

On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last

I may without fail

Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.

(Dylan Thomas, Love In the Asylum)

--

I've been feeling oddly close to Dylan Thomas's poetry lately. Perhaps it is not so much Thomas, for all his eloquence, but simply the act of reading poems once again. 

I've fallen out of reading deep works. And I realize that when I stop reading rich prose my writing feels loose and sags, like laundry left on the line for too long. 

The trick to telling a good story is listening, I think. You have to listen to respond to someone or something, whether it be with words or film. 

It's been less intuitive to learn this without words and with my camera. Capturing the moments that are there instead of creating pictures of how I think things should be. I'm  beginning to respond to what I'm seeing, rather than trying to execute a vision I already had.