Saturday, January 29, 2011

The Last Buffalo: A Response to David Wojnarowicz's Falling Buffalo Photograph

     Since “Eschewal: Response to Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World” I have the first trial of writing from an image.  The image is Untitled [Falling Buffalo] by David Wojnarowicz.  I chose the image for a visual analysis paper I am writing for my one art history class, “Downtown in the 80’s.”  Recently his film “Fire in My Belly” was removed from Washington DC’s Portrait Gallery, creating quite a controversy.  Falling Buffalo is austere by comparison to much of his other work.  The drama of the scene is very captivating and it is perhaps one of my favorite of his works.  The poem is as follows:

The Last Buffalo

The last buffalo are falling
from the ragged west. 
Our mouths went dry
watching them dumbfounded,
for we knew there was something
beyond gravity pulling their bodies,
how they spiraled, turned,
how their hooves flailed,
their heads reared to the sky. 
Those wild dark eyes,
did they see
the clarity of blue that day? 
Did they smell the adrenaline off each other? 
Did they feel anything
when their bodies first touched
the trees below? 
One by one they toppled – those weighty,
cumbersome bodies. 
They were all we had left. 



     It is a first draft and I put it together from a free-write rather hurriedly and haphazardly.  Hopefully I will get to have time to revise it and be able to post a more finished product later. 

1 comment:

  1. "When you find your own voice, and that voice is "different" from the norm, people tend to be lost for words.
    I like the beat of her words, and the cadence of her language. I make my living as a writer; tell her I wish my copy sounded like hers."

    Most are not compliments as people are rough but look at http://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/fddir/my_friend_is_a_shy_writer_with_little_exposure/

    http://www.reddit.com/r/writing

    ReplyDelete