Part 1 of Out in the Open: a poem by Tomas Transtromer

The labyrinth of late autumn.
A discarded bottle lies at the entrance to the wood.
Walk in.  The forest in this season is a silent palace of abandoned rooms.
Only a few, precise sounds: as if someone were lifting twigs with tweezers;
as if, inside each tree trunk, a hinge was creaking quietly.
Frost has breathed on the mushrooms and they've shrivelled up;
they are like the personal effects of the disappeared.
It is almost dusk.  You need to leave now
and find your landmarks again: the rusted implements out in the field
and the house on the other side of the lake, red-brown
and square and solid as a stock-cube.

Kitchen Song; a poem by Laura Kasischke

The white bowls in the orderly
cupboards filled with nothing.

The sound
of applause in running water.
All those who've drowned in oceans, all
who've drowned in pools, in ponds, the small
family together in the car hit head on.  The pantry

full of lilies, the lobsters scratching to get out of the pot, and
   God

being pulled across the heavens
in a burning car.

The recipes
like confessions.
The confessions like songs.
The sun.  The bomb.  The white

bowls in the orderly
cupboards filled with blood.  I wanted

something simple, and domestic.  A kitchen song.

They were just driving along.  Dad
turned the radio off, and Mom
turned it back on.

SFIFF 55: Wuthering Heights

Andrea Arnold does Wuthering Heights!  It's a dream come true!  She totally gets the book, and then, thank god, she doesn't betray it with a lot of BBC-drama type styling and other thespian nonsense.  What we get is raw, unmediated human nature briefly diverted by civilization but returned through tragedy to its elements.  Civilization is the tragedy.  She celebrates the natural sublime, the bleak, rain-lashed landscape, the savage, 'inappropriate' emotions, the mud, blood, and fur; birth and death and cruelty; fire, rock, and rain.  It is thrilling and beautiful, hands down the best film in the festival.