"Accept this crown from a reverent hand
For I alone of mortals have the privilege:
With you I stay, with you I talk,
I hear your voice
Although I do not see you.
So may my finish-line match my start."
- Euripides, Hippolytos, translated by Anne Carson
**
These are not the ruins
of cathedrals,
a conclusion I saw
clearly, when setting out
to witness the crystalline
moment before
dawn, unfurled within
the date, knowing
full well the mountain
was not a hypothesis.
I am still testing against
the control of this
filtered forest, as though
it were not an imaginary,
as though the photographic
act could itself
still accommodate
a procedure of
detachment, where the machine
itself emerged embodied, subject
to memory or care.
The process was
always analogue,
and the fixer
had not yet dried when,
watchful for missing
presences, I dared
to touch the ice-stilled
image:
greygreen shimmer
of silver birch, khaki blur,
each fronded small-
leafed branch, the muted
rocks of the quartz-
flecked river stream,
speckled with celluloid
shimmer in the dark
chemical wet. Rodchenko
understood the machines
were his comrades,
but these potentials lie
abandoned, like
the gifts of a king
facing the afterlife:
the archive
is scattered like a set
of things lost
from pockets after
an accident,
a book collection
left out in the rain.
Who will care? He is
up there where
I left him, his own
collection of frozen
moments not yet
closed, although
no longer active,
the dilute principle
embedded in
the encroaching snow
of history, or perhaps
teetering on an outside
that’s all precipice
and edges.
I am now more mystic
than scientist, perhaps
in this roaming among
invisibles, this listening
to ice winds in the wires,
the dust on the birds
in Khlebnikov’s radio
waves, in my self-
stated role to re-
collect: to find
whatever can still pass
as talisman: the word
that grants agency
to walk forward
in storms, to remember
the first sight
of the mountain
these names we give
to geography: a
momentary field
between the two seas,
the distant stretch
of the Tasman
and the vast cold
South Pacific, linked
by the mighty Haast
and the Waimak, against
a horizon that scrolls
with cloud, where the city
is not invisible but still
arriving into whatever
a future still is. The blunt saw-
toothed edge of a gunmetal
sky’s blade, dulled
with no recent fire, a rusted
horizon stuck to the seagulls, like
unreadable signatures
scrolling without end, peeling
off from the cry, shaking
the remaining
trees, self-
stating the return,
the whole that cracks
and shards with weight
of icy air, swayed
and then stilled from west
as though arrested. The old
machines are still
here with me, faithfully
documenting
the end of things, arriving
as though mirrored
in the beginning: arriving
mid-thought, attended
by heavy absences, attended
by a water wellsprung direct
from the pale glacial eye,
almost transparent.