Triangle Shirt Waist

In the last picture taken of her, she had her bottoms off. It's black and white, where it was once bent a line cuts across it making the emulsion crack, making a kind of syntactic space between the top of her left thigh and her left hip and pubic hair. The line makes a frame in the frame, makes a second silent enclosure in the long ago silent captured light. She's not looking at the camera, which is to her left; she's been facing it, but has turned now, so her torso is turned away, but her legs are not yet followed. A sheer scrap of silk or nylon scarf is draped over her left shoulder and breast; her dark hair is cut short. Her profile's gaze is a glimpse of a gaze between expressions, like the smile or pose she's just dropped hasn't been followed by whatever was to be next, the next pose or next word, since she may be speaking; it's a face that has fallen between looks, and so looks loose and almost nonhuman; because the eyes and lips and opening of the jaw and turning of the head all seem out of synch, parts of disparate expressions but not adding up to a whole face, coherent and meaning. It is this ugliness, this expansive disintegrated shattering face that assures me she was beautiful. Not at all fat, she has the thickness of flesh that was well thought of in the days before color. A rump firm large and lovable. Breasts maybe a little small for her rump, but larger than mine and lovely. The meat around her waist like banquet roast, like a quilt to roll in, a refuge, a land. Who took this? The same who wrote, on the back, taken the day before she died in a dip pen and black ink that's faded to a kind of blue? Behind her a castiron lampstand with a candelabra atop it, and to her left, just at the right frame edge, the footend of a sleighbed, sheet and blanket unmade.
In her figure and skincolor, her breasts and ass, the line of cracked light that traverses her pussy, in the way her face will never resolve into an expression that is stable or human ... in the mystery of who was taking her, watching her, and who chose to take this moment, the one usually turned away from, the moment between ... and in needing to believe it was not she, herself, who traced the inscription on the back, dipping the pen in ink, blotting it, creating a tale of the death of her own image, but in not being able to believe otherwise ... and in that she clearly was working, as I had ... A simple thing, finding a photograph on the ground near an apartment building's garbage cans, where one has clearly just been emptied, by death, no doubt ... a simple thing become this terrible thing, this having found a still from a silent movie of my own insides acted by a woman I'll never get to ... know ... thank ... protect ... or love.

You've gone now. I like how you keep dripping out of me, even a couple hours since you came. I like it more when you're not here than when you are. How it makes the house more quiet and still, the light a comfort and a reminder of time moving on. It makes being here a kind of oration, a sermon eloquent of a power that can never ebb, never catch its breath, never pause. It would throw me off the cliff and continue on. Sitting here, feeling your sperm runnel out of me. My hands warm.