The Photograph

By Sampson Starkweather

Ask the photograph. It says science. It says spoon. It says you will not remember how black the sky was over the parking lot when you held her wrist as if it were sand. You can’t “capture” a moment. All that light. A cage.

There is a process called burning in photography, when a person or image is burned-out of the picture to get it just right. Memory’s like that. The image as language. This has to do with mathematics. Or desire. Slowly losing out. Images turn up like silver bellies of dead fish making an alphabet in the Hudson. In Canada, a girl falls off her bicycle and skins her knee. Love is not like riding a bicycle. From a bridge, the lack of beauty is impossible.

There is no feeling like fiddling with a camera. Each icon, the words for: moon, mountain, stars. The settings with their weight, a postage. There is no longer a necessity to lick stamps. What happens to the words: shutter-speed, lens cap, flash. To deal with the undeliverable, the U.S. Postal Service started a dead letter office. The words don’t die, people do. No one goes “postal” without a heart. Beat-beat. Beat-beat.

You believe in words. Their power. Weight. Like some kind of nerd. Words too, can get inside you. Unprotected. Circumcision of silence. So you forwarded me an email with your subscribed-to-word of the day: Deflagrate: 1. to burn; verb; 2. Chiefly Chem. to burst into flames and burn away rapidly. Like love, words are useless on their own. Build something. Jesus was a carpenter, this was the only thing the Bible got right. Love as a message is impossible. Love as a nail driven into heartwood pine is real. We live in the real. Words, loves.

When I say “you,” I don’t mean you. The poem has two hearts. Tony Hoagland can do nothing about it. Everybody knows there’s no such thing as the perfect poem. Music. I have burned you out of the poem to get it just right. Chemicals of the cursor. The perfect poem without you. The right lie. In the medical field, this is referred to as the position of the fetus. A nurse holding an ultrasound up to a wall of light. If an unborn child does not have the “right lie,” there can be complications. The human being is the only species that clambers to be lied to. The doctors perform a procedure to rotate the fetus. The earth turning. A record of this. Human music.

It almost always has to do with light. In photography, when light has the same properties as water, it’s known as the “right light.” Flowing, beneath the ground. Imperfect, real. A girl can be perfect. A poem, like “you,” doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. The back of a calf, a “relatively average” girl’s calf. Walking away. I told myself, if I couldn’t have (hold: this has to do with ownership) her, I’d fuck her with (my: this is the poet’s “right lie”) words. (Less messy) or maybe more, which might be nice. The same hotel. People check in and out. A used key-card in the parking lot. The number 356.

The photograph is proof of time. This has to do with “flaws” in god’s plan. Watchmakers make mistakes too. Numbers vs. Images. Geometry as evidence against agony: Exhibit A: the shadow loses no blood. Photography is a footnote of light. No one reads books in the dark. The footnotes of historical books are supreme fiction. The politics of light can get tricky. Abraham Lincoln knew this, and so, was shot, a spurt of shadow flowed from the hole in his head. President Kennedy also came too close. To light. A motorcade of light. In a home-movie you can make out a bloodbird fly from his neck, Jackie’s face flooded in light. Hell is merely a series of images you can’t shake. A hand, waving goodbye.

The poet must pay for making a private language in his poem. The soul proprietor. Back taxes. (I just killed an ant with my big toe.) You can’t invent a world out of language. Stupid poet. A keyboard of images. Fish. Seaweed. Around the heart. This has to do with how long you can hold your breath. Count to 70. The correct way of drowning.

The photograph attempts to create a “flowing boundary” between the invisible and what Crane called “the bees of paradise.” Rilke had his bees “of the invisible.” Rimbaud in Africa, a footnote. In one photo, Rimbaud has a halo. A textbook of light. We edit into existence. A girl’s leg, disappearing. A hallway of possibility. A new Eurydice. Drunk, snark hunt. The green dress stitched with light. On her shoulder by a thin string of electricity. Pull the plug. The leg is flesh, which doesn’t make it real. Eyes are out of the equation. Walls are real. It’s in their nature, being that they divide. The Chinese have 3 and ½ years to figure out how to keep the rain out of the Olympics. This has to do with probability. A piano under water in New Orleans. A photograph of music.

The photograph does not fade away ala Back to the Future. People do. Real people. Feel such things. Which doesn’t make them real. Some Hollywood writer knew this metaphor would resonate with Americans. Having burned himself out of the photos of everyone he ever loved. Photographs are a product of acids. There is a dark room where the slow revelation of memory occurs, submerged in chemical water. The “lost” boa constrictor on a flyer stuck to a railroad-tie in Pittsboro, NC. Disintegrating in southern rain.

A famous photographer went to India and gave the children of prostitutes, cameras. What she knew was that the photos that come closest to this world are all wrong. The right light. She taught them nothing. A form of perfection. A child’s eye to get the feeling to come through. The world is out of focus. Some of the best shots were taken by a boy sitting on the handlebars of a bicycle. The winning photo was taking during a cartwheel by a 13-year-old girl who would become a prostitute the next year. Time defied by a cartwheel. A girl standing on her hands. Time: a commodity. A man in the street selling DVD’s, Back to the Future, 400 rupees.

The “you” is boring. The actual you. But your calf in the photograph has nothing to do with you. Cropped out. Keats couldn’t have known he was talking about desire when he came up with “negative capability.” But his brother understood. A dead letter. An empty space in a crossword puzzle. Love is the longing for love. Nothing is delivered. Come rain, sleet or snow.

Love or a Polaroid: the suspension of disbelief. Chemistry states belief is a suspension. Oil and water. Lips pressed against lips. Birds fall from the trees. Newtonian bullshit. A photograph has no bodily fluids. It cannot compete with the pleasures of salad dressing. It is not, to my knowledge, capable of flamenco dancing. A traveling darkroom. The positive peeled from the negative. Like all great inventions, the Polaroid was a product of a girl. Ask the grass. Ask the father “Why can’t I see it now?” Love never stood a chance.

The photograph is a life/or has a life? Hölderlin says death too, is a life. Hölderlin never had his picture taken either. He would have looked like lightning. A portrait of lightning. Ever lasting. A photo is not unlike a body of water. Think of a way it’s not, and you have no imagination. A bridge. A rusted refrigerator by the tracks (a smear campaign against hide-n-seek). A 1994 yearbook of clouds. The awkward teenage years. Pittsboro Thrift Shop, Tuesday, 12:30 AM, the pants section, acid-washed jeans, left back pocket. The little black teeth of a comb.

A girl’s leg is not a girl’s leg. The dress, presently is made of common cloth, hanging like a ghost. Captured by a walk-in closet. It has no memory. Of being light. An image of an anti-image: night. We tread between. My uncle would walk into the night taking photos of what he couldn’t see. A map of the desert. In math, there are equations that never end. Love. The distance between Japanese beetles. 30% of all Americans have metal in their body. Magnets holding art to a refrigerator. I used to wonder what would happen if a plane flew through a rainbow. Skin is the largest organ; it’s like Russia; nobody realizes its size, the way you can die out there; try waging a war within skin. History is a placemat. Labor movements are never remembered. The job of skin. “Popeye was righteous.” Everything is replaced. There is no face in the photograph.

The “you” wants to know what the poem knows about the photograph. A green dress. Falling. Like cotton off Light’s hips. The you wants these words. It wants to slide them in its back pocket like those flimsy black combs the schools gave out on “picture day.” It wants its frame. Glory. Glory. The poem doesn’t care about you. It wants you to get a nosebleed. It wants you to have serious underwear issues on Broadway and West 28^th street. A clock breathing. The poem’s finger, trembling on a white rook. The you, gnawing off the black knight’s head. The poem always has a handful of your pieces beside her, off the board, standing like little gravestones. A cemetery. Of you.

Old-fashioned cameras had a lens that showed the image upside down. This has to do with the machinery of the eye. And ice cream cones. The first cameras were built by biologists to mimic the human eye. To observe time, objectively. The scientific method. Cage it like a yellow screeching bird. One theory says this was many people’s definition of God during the Industrial Revolution. The book of the wrench. A machine eye that could “keep” time. This has to do with slavery. Thelonious Monk. Light inside a white key. A zoo of it. You can’t keep it like a piece of the World Trade Center. Infomercial blues. Beauty uses you. Jinx.

A photograph is a symbol. Of status or an incantation of Christ. A farmer holding a pitchfork like a dream. The sheep slung over a man’s shoulders. Goodness. In an image, “the Other” is always implied. The one eye of a fish carved into a wall was the world’s first camera. The fisher king. An advertisement. A powerful image is one you can’t see. Light is simply a degree of darkness. A matter of mathematics. A woman with her head in her hands on a park bench. A bird fluttering in an empty gymnasium. The onset of love. The wet, awkward foal, attempting to walk. A transfer truck driving by. The stars at twelve in the afternoon.

The poem is no match for the feel of human breath on your neck. Waking up with a boner and not being able to remember your dream. An approximation. A rendering. The right lie. Memory. A naked woman drinking a glass of milk in the dark. A strip of negatives in an envelop. The exoskeleton of an image. Words, to trick us. A child’s game. We make up the rules as we go along. I burn the you out to get the poem right. A photo is worth a 1,000 words. One word is your name.

In chemistry, there is a saying: like dissolves like. In photography, the saying goes: The camera loves action. They also say the camera doesn’t lie, which of course is a lie. The wrong lie. The I. In the photograph, there is no you, the girl is light. Beauty beyond the message. Walking against the red arrows, the fire hydrant behind a glass wall. “break in case of emergency” A leg. A dress. A walking away. Color and light, a mixture. What we save. Damaged from the flood. Movement trailed by halos. The girl. Disappearing. Behind a wall. To each his own hand-stitched hell. One cannot “turn one’s back.” Ask Orpheus. But this has nothing to do with love. I have burned it out. The realms of heart to heart, forever. The you, in the photograph, becoming ash.