ST. MALO, FACSIMILE

The punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond — as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see [...] toward the absolute excellence of being, body and soul together.

* Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

 1

St. Malo: gray, all gray and sand and my body

            posed in the froth of a crashing wave, bent.  I sat or stood on the rock

and the pose was a punctum: pockmarked, jagged: piercing

            the pockets of my jeans or the soles of my sneakers.  All your photographs

from this period are gray and blue-gray and green-

            gray, with only a touch of tan or only a touch of sand. 

The waves were tame compared to their postcards;         

            there was no breaching, no breaking

or rushing of city walls.  I was not afraid of drowning.         

            Only later, the night we ate Indian food and I broke,

flung my napkin on the floor and walked out to walk back

            alone.  Out the door I thought I was going to die.

Three years old: you snap me climbing out back — not rock

            but my father's sculptures.  Yellow metal, brick-coloured metal, cobalt

metal: cold on the limbs, on the skin, on the gripping hands. 

            The yellow is a circle: a steel orbit: a mobius strip I imagine suspended

in sea and gray.  I am a butcher: a baker: an owl or a pussycat. 

            Adrift.  Imagine the floating: my body fierce with movement, fluid

2

becoming fluid, becoming beyond matter: a state of motion

            folding over motion.  Perpetual morphing.

The city that night: sudden black and cobblestone, someone waiting

            in every alley, every corner a wrong turn and leading

always back to the beach: to the shipwrecked skeleton

            of the swimming pool: (dull, hollow in the blackness:

cement emptied of high tide): to the frigid water:

            to the sand: (shifting silver): to the stone

walls: to the wet and the wet of the sea.  I wanted you

            to be water: I wanted and from the sand

that evening I threw myself at the water, sought

            no more of stone and alleys and restaurants

and you taking your photographs, so many

            photographs.  No more of you bleakly spooning

chutney onto your plate because you are an artist

            and this is or is not all

about temperament and idiosyncrasy.

            No more copies; no more originals.

3

The morning we drove off you said you were going

            for a walk, but see me.  In the image I am reading

in the window of our hotel room.  I am watching

            you watching me through the lens.  There is sunlight

and dirty stone in the background; there is the hotel sign

            'Les Chiens du Guet' in the background. 

The angle is upward; the hotel is yellow.  Me from the street:

            I thought I was going to die on the street: on the beach:

with you still back there chewing.  No, I am not reading. 

            I am wondering where were your thoughts while I floundered,

where was your compassion, instinct, corroboration

            of love and how do you do this  —

frame and re-

            frame an image pitch me bear me under and under and

under the waves?  And yet no, I am not reading.  Or yes I am

            not reading.  Yes in the image I am watching you.

Yes the hotel is yellow.  Yes you were there

            in the sunlight; and yes I am opening the shutter  —

Buffalo, New York; 2001

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