Capricious, inventive, magnificent they are!
A short selection of a month’s gatherings during short trips, on which Odds and Lens set its lens on Lens (it was about time!), Arras, Dunkerque, Grand-Fort-Philippe.
IUT – Lens
Lens
Lens – Église Saint-Léger
Head in the clouds – Lens
Cloud on a stand – Lens
Mirror in Lens
Arras – vue depuis le Beffroi
Arras – Grand’Place
Crescendo. Arras – Grand’Place
Arras – vue depuis l’Hôtel de Ville
Grand-Fort-Philippe
Grand-Fort-Philippe
Grand-Fort-Philippe
Dunkerque – vue depuis le Beffroi de Saint-Eloi
Malo-les-Bains
Malo-les-Bains
Dunkerque – dunes
Dunkerque – Digue des Alliés
Dunkerque – Marina
Port de Dunkerque
Port de Dunkerque
Dunkerque – port
Odds and Lens 
The art of forecasting past weather
It occurred to Constable contemplating
A Van Ruisdael winterscape
Now in the collection
Of the Philadelphia Museum of Art
— It haunts my mind, he wrote
(of another), and clings to my heart —
That the tilt of the windmills
And the furl of their sails
The shapes of the sky
And the light’s southern glow
Spelled a weather forecast past
The wind turning a warming
Before the next morning
A thaw
Alas on these points
I must trust the authorities, i.e.
Constable himself (1836)
And Gedzelman (1991)
For I have neither
Their eyes nor yours
And I will not dare
To venture what Howard (1802)
Godfather of clouds
Would have called
This beautiful modification
I am very sorry that to me
They look like a bunch
Of exquisite cotton balls
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It is a glorious achievement
For a squad of cotton balls
To be examined in the light
Of many an expert’s insight
“Suspended water” – twice suspended
Intangible as only the past can be
Clouds retain their aura of mystery
Even in present photographs
Where they effortlessly cohabit with light
Van Ruisdael’s landscape – not currently on view –
Is itself an image in a cloud
But a look at his Flemish skies
Could make us believe that
“Those solemn days
Peculiar to his country and to ours
When without storm
Large rolling clouds
Scarcely permit a ray of sunlight
To break the shades of the forest”
Are eternal
They make the present look like the fulfillment of a premonition
Perhaps there is no contradiction
Between the illustrious authorities you quote
And your own opinion
What if Gedzelman himself
Decided to enlarge the temporal scale
One evening, in New York,
In May 1989,
When the first episode of Seinfeld aired
And he started thinking about the elasticity of clouds
Both in their material
And metaphorical substance?
Later that evening, when going to sleep,
He might have said to himself that painted clouds
Had served for too long
As cotton earplugs
For those who refused to hear
The sound of past winds.
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Cet envoi! Sublime!
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