Fragments for Andrea (Right Now)

September. Right now the metal doors, right now their opening.
Memory of some shallow room behind them, a mineral wall flush
As a mouth flooded with images, their technocratic swallowing
Of cut and rime and drill. Right now these images turn and turn.
All tender turbines, warm as wax, dark pupils open as apertures,
Strobing the wall. It’s time you enter them like some black camera
Up to no good at all. Behind you the back of the head, relief of its leaving.
Some Roman relief, Roman copy, some resin, neither ruin nor romance
Nor roughly fingered evidence. Oscillating between image and object,
Charge and current, representation and its resistance, the room slows
Down. Images do. Objects do. The eye doesn’t. We are here.
Where are you? Electrical nerve center of rotors, a rosebud mouth.
Whirl of soft blades, hard animal of the cylinder, memory of magnets,
Glacial flow of electrons. Faraday’s electromagnetic induction
Of 1832. Invention like a song spinning, increasing output. Turbine
Silent as a mouth, magnet of its throat. Electricity rushing upward
Like language. I’m here to tell you that we went to the historical center
And no one was there. Silvering metal doors scratched with names,
Dates. Black paintings of urinals, silver monochromes of. We went
To the industrial outskirts, all fields and frames and pyramids of loose
Materials. In the distance and in close-up: long lines of men.
All we could see was the back of their heads: shorn, battered,
Empty black apertures where their faces should be. Late summer,
Early autumnal. Sahara dust. No icons. Genocidaires, their empty
Suits, lead in the polls from the margins and the centers. Right now
Calendrical violence turns. What symbolic exchange, what succor
Do you offer? We turn the earth, plant it with death, scrape it for life,
Kill it again. The oiled motor of the air, streaked with black cameras
And missiles, buzzing like insects and death. Don’t talk the desire
Of the camera. Don’t write about the longing of language
To live. Don’t exempt evidence of the body in cold fragments, that
Matrix, blazoned by oneself or other, cropped and hurt and loved.
Optical system, libidinal system, exposure of image and body both.
Soft spinning of your soft eye. Nothing is moving, not really, except
This, some iris. Constricting, dilating, surrendering, whirling, resisting.
Generating form, darkness, electricity, solidarity, color, resistance.
Aluminum, wax. Metal, glass. Expose no body but your own. Mineral of
This moment. Output of. Right now, I mean. September. Right now.

– Quinn Latimer