FLUX & FLOW Poetry Film: "Compass" from RED

Описание: Our series "Flux & Flow: Perugia Press Poetry Films" reimagines Perugia poets’ work through film. This video features Melanie Braverman's poem "Compass" from her Perugia Press book RED. The film was created by Perugia Press's summer 2025 intern Regan Williams, and it features her voiceover of Braverman's poem. Find out more about this poet and her book on our website: https://perugiapress.org/product/red/

Music: “Madeleine” by Good Kid.

Full poem text:

COMPASS

First a table, then a flecked white cloth. Burnt matches, a saucer of salt, one rouge-
stained
cork left buoyant on its sea of white. The flatware, real silver, doesn’t
match. So there was a meal. Friends, no, intimates were involved. Light cups this
place in its palm and the sea lapping at the pilings below fills the melancholic bowls
adrift on their listing shelves. For now we see the two of you alone, one reading on
the daybed in the sunlight and the other at the table, eyes cast out the window to
the bay, ignoring the vessels there, plumbing the horizon for its message, which is
this: for today, everything lasts.

One sleeps, the other draws water from the tap.

Up the steep half-stairs is the bed on which together you dream in the mutable
ratios of ocean to sky: a friend in a favorite shirt made soft from repetitive washing,
or a dream of the act of washing itself, or one of you sectioning a grapefruit with
delicate, physical hands. This is a summer house and these, friends, are summer’s
dreams, meaning, here it is always summer. In the morning, before the jellyfish and
horseshoe crabs ride in on the sexual tide, how easily you dive from sleep into the
stellar bay, time accumulating luxuriously as beach wrack at your feet. Nights your
small light shines through the door’s porthole, casts a round pool onto the plank
walk. Someone arrives empty-handed and knocks.