High Contrast (part 2)
Exposing my learning through poetry & photography
In March 2024, I shared images made with expired 35mm film alongside poetic verse in spanish under the banner “High Contrast.” Today, we return to the expired alongside poetic prose, this time mostly in english. Image and text converse and refract rather than state or reflect.
Inside the dappled region where I thought myself cold, or chilled — for the slightest identification I wrote the falling feeling and on my tongue I caught the pit you spat me once you were through with the flesh of the fruit. It was hot, or warmed —
and like all diction, its most emphatic place is at the end. To such excess, I propose the silence of moment.
It’s not the death of the errant, but her fall took me to see the trees from where the crows perched laughing. It’s not the fall of the hand on the branch, it’s its blow or the sound peddles make when lapped by timid waves on a chilled shore.
“The breath of desire is Eros. Inescapable as the environment itself. . .” (Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson)
Now I’ve gone and lost my diction. Around this corner does there not exist a harmful intention disguised as a sunflower? Won’t the sunflower track me like it does the lonely sun, or does it suffice to say that I’ll be terminated here without cause indefinitely?
And just like that, I am not forgotten — here where the ground is strangely sure, I may have misplaced the day where the sky broke where earth emptied. I’m suddenly upended by a bouquet of examples. Something does kind of smell like shit. By inhaling I integrate it. I cough and the alarm goes off.
Hurtling through sky comes dust with dirt. Nunca me ha enojado contra las nubes ni sus polvos. Lo opuesto, entiendo los dos con calridad en las aguas agotadas, en la mitad de su caída, se me han vaciado and now body springs forth in rapture.
He who ate and in the steep grade found a rolling peach unbruised will dream of bones here and there in tar and pitch.
This was the beginning, where I lost what but kinds and spent evenings going and taking though not unscathed. With my fingertips they built these towers aching altitude. Every time they fall I feel their tremor far away. Might you know how deep? This effect must be a matter of cause.