Flash Photo
(short, not sweet, always a photo)
Every morning and evening I read a few pages from Teju Cole's remarkable book, Blind Spot. I suspect when I finish it, I'll reread it, probably not page to page but just open it here and there. ![]() I'm not someone who rereads books or rewatches movies (with the exception of Apocalypse Now and Badlands), though there are plenty of poems I read and reread. And I'm not someone who has much of a daily practice except for making the commitment to spend some part of the day writing and several times a week (once it was daily, now less often) take a photograph. If you are not familiar with Bind Spot, it looks like this. ![]() So you can see (literally) why it appeals to me. I don't think anyone has made better use of short pieces of writing than Cole. Here is the opening passage from "Brooklyn" (pictured above). "One of the common uses of the word 'shadow' was as a synonym for 'photograph.' This was the sense in which Sojourner Truth used it when she wrote, on the 1864 photographic postcard bearing her image, 'I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.'" And just now writing this, I see that shadow behind the photograph (a scan of my grandmother's garden scissors) which inspired the following poem, published by Best Friends Feminist Collective in Albuquerque in the early 70s.
SHEARS Those long silver scissors shears you call them sit in your kitchen like you long your hands long like the shimmer of vodka sliding down your lean throat The garden scissors snap the heads of roses and mums that sit in coffee cans in your kitchen We see them when we visit you The scissors next to your hand In San Francisco passing over the Hills Bros. plant I thought of you The beach in Carmel Waves breaking silver I thought of you In your kitchen thinking of me Honeymooning your granddaughter a bride married on your back porch surrounded by mums and roses your scissors had been to work for me You stayed outside most of that day to greet guests But you longed for the kitchen champagne did not satisfy The silver of the kitchen longed also What I planned to do:
What I hadn't planned to do:
Resonance: that is how Blind Spot is working on me. And why, for now, it is so valuable.
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