A Review in Verse for Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog's Love Letters (in 3D)

There is not art tonight

But that of memory.

Yet how much room for painting there is

In the tight passages of Chauvet cave.

There is even room enough

For the drawings of my forefather's forefathers,

32,000 years ago,

That have been locked so long

In a slide-sealed limestone cliff

That are etch-edged and fresh,

And liable to shock as Pollock.

Over the great carpet of calcite crystal

Steps of cave man and cave bear.

It is all lit by invisible red flames.

It trembles as rhino limbs rushing through time.

And I ask myself:

“Are your eyes strong enough to bear

these species that are but echoes:

Is this camera strong enough

To carry a wild horse back to its source

And back to us again

Belted over with stars?”

Yet I would lead my grandson by the hand

Through millennia we'll never understand;

And so I stumble. And the crystals drip into stalactites

With such a silence of forgotten dreams.

*

(All apologies to Hart Crane, both for this poem and for the existence of James Franco.)