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        - Oh, it was very silly...
        - As beautiful as that!
                               from the film Ninotchka

The sound booth is dark
as a cave is, and quiet
now the engineer has left.

The first reel is running
and its violet light flickers
across my upturned face:

I’m in pre-war Paris in spring,
a studio lot in Los Angeles,
this darkened room in Frankfurt,

I am a flute girl dismissed
from a dinner party in Athens. I watch
hidden in shadow from behind a screen

as the lens lingers in a forgotten realm,
translating with a piercing clarity
through the apertures of sight

a visible image of her
in the earthly world of the senses.
The restless gaze draws in from stillness breath.

Don’t make an issue of my womanhood,
she warns. I lean in to the microphone,
Mein Geschlecht is ganz nebensächlich

and as Socrates speaks through Plato,
and Plato through Socrates, so she speaks,
a little huskily, through me.

Like the swallows migrating between Moscow and Paris
a message is carried on Love’s fluttering wings,
from the eyes to the trembling soul,
from the Athenian elite to a romantic comedy,
from the immortal realms of the Absolute, here, now, to me.

© Frances Bathgate, February 2010