Though seemingly naturalised enough over the ages, it is still a vexed issue of human cognitive capacity, how poetry from the deep past, whose semantic and syntactic bodies are relatively unfamiliar, still can be recognised almost instantly. Can we conceive of “poeticity” as a metaphysical imagination, always existing within us, helping us “sense” the poetry beyond the familiarity of language? Does “poetic” as a category, enveloped and presented by the body of poetry, has a deeper manifestation of interiority beyond its external form and structure? We propose to push forth the question of the “poetic”, by developing “shadow” as a term-index that dovetails Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami’s (1940–2016) film and poetic practices. Referring to diverse film sequences from Kiarostami’s works like The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), Taste of Cherry (199), Where is the Friend’s House (1987) we would explore the use of “darkness” in Kiarostami’s cinema and its shifting modulations of affects and intentionality, where the intermedial impulses have been rendered with unusual cinematic gestures with various poetic traditions (e.g. early-medieval Sufi poetry, Japanese Haiku, modern Iranian poetry). The main propositions of the presentation may include, in the works of Kiarostami—a. how the affect as anticipation in the form of unusual modes of withdrawal and poise, far from the momentary concentration of pre-emotive juncture, creates the possibility of articulation of intermediality within the “darkness”; b. how “shadow” as an imaginaire becomes the bridge between the inner bodies of “poetic” and the “cinematic”; c. How the latent epic quality of the “shadow” within the “darkness” creates a vortex within which the perception of the characters and the gazing agencies are released from their enclosures of causal framework of subjectivity as the characters and the gazes tend to gravitate towards a-causal, a-modern, shifting assemblages of affects, intentionality, and temporality.