Merville Odes

MERVILLE ODES


1.

Because of the slow revolving
some blue matter tucked inside the star
sometimes squeezes out--
this is the origin of photography

which Dr Reich discovered years
after as blue sparks visible
in the night even the day sky
when considered through long cardboard tubes

much longer than what keeps your paper towels
from crunchdom and unspooling spill
and painted black inside and then oh my
how many lights you see and these

make little pictures in your eye
which later you mistake for women lampposts
mailmen little dogs smug SUVs
tooling through your little neighborhood

o Christ how little we all are
compared to or faced with those blue glints
or flakes of real reality shoveled from up there
wait I have a snapshot in my hand

that really shows my hand.

2.
Mecause of tu --
the bling-blank mother lode
of rhinestones in
the pressure factory
spins genuine diamonds.

So much is true.
So much is true there is no room left
for my cushioning falsehoods,
the thighs of Swedish women,
the memory of Slavic memory

as wielded by the White Sea
(the Kola Peninsula) writer
John of Bobrow in another yazyk.
Or paltering polonies,
midrash of frenzied Indians--
even the Hopi are goyim--
and I detect the friend of a friend
shooing random cats out of a stray house.

3.

Everything belongs to me, no?
Everything but you
who are no thing, hence can't
belong, canst barely be

in this blue Osmanli winter
churches in domes domes in snow
they leap across the voices of the children
singing womanwise in the sacred space

behind the iconostasis. Now you know.
You are just some voices in my head,
women imitating men. Men
imitating me. And all of it a trick

God plays on the world and never seems to tire of.

4.

Because we see brick better than stone
because a street glistening with rain
is already a compromise with theology
and the red lights (no-color in your images
just hot spots) on carriages
are really gleams of sunshine maybe
on the bright day your process required
and no one passed. Because we see

a street better than a road, a house
better than a hill, an actress up there
on the screen better than our mother.

5.

Keep thinking that means something,
doesn't. Play of light on surface
sensitive to light. Play of dark
on what we try to remember.

Every photograph is a terrible aphasia.

6.

What could it speak if it were only a color
and nothing in our hands not even a stick
to point to the wall with Here Be Image
and it is only something moving that you make stop?

A picture is something moving you make stop.



Robert Kelly

Posted over on Robert Kelly @ earthlink