The 1889 Paris Exposition was heralded as the "triumph of iron". Built for it was the Gallery of Machines [...] and the Eiffel Tower [...] which survived after the close of the fair because of its utility as a tower for wireless transmission.
- Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, pp 130-1
paused, to hold an angle
against a walk of brick,
crooked in a sun’s
vertical hold: to rest
the eye, column-like, against
the horizontals of a street:
among sudden phonics
pooling as water,
as romance
conventions cluster,
a seemingly-arbitrary noise field,
lingering, at points & overhangs, forming
lines, heard on radio maybe, and then
relaying, in subsequent intervals,
intermittently, the picture
of a street: a face
remaining as a day; a day’s
trace, snapping clear
of its heatmap of crowds,
in that lyrical minute
of a hill at the window, recalling dark
imagined beaches, and beyond,
the city, signalling:
*
and if this day must drop
to sand, as a bleached
sea shack collapsing
its weathered upright into night,
as the limit of a person,
slipping also, at the end
of your hand: the actual,
particular knee or ankle, angled
against dark, against light
going: as an eye
folds again, divisive,
against the larger
place of air: all solidity of line
or path, its border
of light, frayed down, now
to sparks: the one grabbed
handful: nub, node
of granular, felt gold:
a single recurring
refrain, the one about light
going and the beach, and how
slowly that particular kiss
will enter to light a dark
that seems yours also: such sightless
densities of remembrance
as to have no author, detonating
the entire register of looked-at things’
slow domino-fall to touch:
*
a trace remaining of crowds,
as the clear, bright quality
of a voice; folkish, sad, detailing
something about love,
in a (Québécois?) French
accent, & how quickly
against the sea’s great blind
icefield an eye colour
cools to sold state: a day
consumed in shapes: each
in succession frozen
into the repeatable exactitude
of a snow-globe Eiffel: particular
and mass-produced
at the same time, like a repeated
memory you will never tire of:
the precise scene, hanging
in patches: the stone path
lit by moths, his copper
hair, in curls, repeating
her lips, the white moon licked
and pressed to skin, a fake
tattoo, and in that
the story goes on:
*
in cafes, but earlier, and half-
remembered: belonging to a minute
of that city, a song recalling
a particular angle of the light
on a face, perhaps: or, and more
usually, to resist putting the I
in her place, and leave, neglected,
repeating itself indefinitely
in its small acoustic universe, her whole
waking to the blank sea
at night, and a window, hanging
without air, without thought
of each image creased
and reflected, their overlay
a border written into the ink itself:
limp and deciduous, the snow globe
sea of city, glints, folds, sheds
appearance, line, style, tightness.
there is no original coast,
instead the dog-eared library of lines
we have coasted, that may match
the actual scale of the path,
the kiss, the tree, the red swing
its glitter
