A Camera Obscura

Carl Marcum

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780062825636
• eBook ISBN: 9781597091190
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

From the edge of a singularity and across desert roads at night, A Camera Obscura teleports its readers through deep space nebulae and the constructs of cityscapes to arrive at what it means to “see.” Lovers embrace in sonnets and meditations move through artworks and Hubble Telescope images as these poems employ ekphrastic visions to balance the profound displacements in the most mundane aspects of our lives with science, fact, faith, and song. In the ceremonial blades of Aztec sacrifice and the anonymity of undocumented lives, these poems accrete into a solar system of images seen true, seen askance, seen in error, seen entire. A Camera Obscura is the dark room of the imagination where s?gnum—the sign, the act—becomes the tangible testaments of living.

Force is force, matter is matter, will is will,

the infinite is infinite, nothing is nothing.

—Leo Tolstoy, A Confession

[ Dark Matter ]

The flat black

of the cast iron

pan, the pull of

flame. Not the iron,

its ferromagnetic

birth drawn deep

core of earth;

not the earth

but her elements.

Not the pan,

but the pig iron,

the bituminous ash.

Not the ingot, but

the sand, the mold

to mass; not the load

but the scour, the meld

the eutectic; not

the molten, but the alloy

the liquid tug of mass

to mass; not the cast

but the pan, the gray

tuned to black

patina of lipids

—fat of animal,

of olive, of living

accumulation

of use. Not the

flame, but the

jet, not the jet

but the burning.

Not the flame

but the light;

the wavelength

blued, of red.

Not the spike

but the interval.

What’s between,

what’s missing;

to be there and

not there; to be

Oakland; to be

and not to be.

The evidence,

the gravitational

lens, the curvature;

postulated, hypothetical

question, rotational

speed of galaxies,

anisotropic apostrophe,

signed and signified.

A hunch, a heft:

a cast iron pan

curing on the stove,

a mundane matter,

dark and certain.

Blind Contours: Night Sky

№ 3

Since the stereo’s playing vintage arrangements, synthetic and pervasive

as microchips, tonight may as well be rushing by

like the city’s sodium lights—an amber countdown elapsing its sequence

past the cranked-open sunroof. Your faithfully

falling apart Volkswagen ferries you out past the light-pollution border

to the clarity of ocean air and dark

heavens: the brittle riddle that’s annoyed you to steering until the

only road left dead-ends into dirt,

the scruff of rock-brush, black and rolling surf. And now at least

the frame stands still against the sky

and the music’s turned kind and melancholic as an old scar—a music

that suits your self-indulgent brood.

Because what haunts your mood isn’t as beautiful or false as a girl on a dance

floor where other lights beckon the

unsteady question that troubles your restlessness. You’d curse the stars

if you had the courage, curse the crude

body that propels you through the firmament. And now, because you’ve

no answer, only more corpulent questions, Vulpecula

foxes herself carefully into the center of your cosmos as the sunroof frames

stars into a simple pattern of coy vixen,

a trickster, a trixie full of guile in the dumb beyond, her slow stumble clarifies

what’s left to you—bequeathed as breath.

Take inventory. Breathe and keep doing so.

№ 4 [ Fata Morgana ]

The night is sleep-deprived whilst the Greyhound lists toward dawn.

Landscape falters out the window: you’re aching homeward, frazzled

as the fields of Joshua trees stamped against the troubled half-dark.

You can’t trust your senses when they reveal the skyline of a distant city

that gleams its broken oath in art-deco arcs & limestone façades, temples of chrome

burnt white, shadow of the dome of pleasure, a prophecy of towers built

from nuclear steam, seams, & edges—ledges of the streamlined Lost Horizon;

Carbide & Carbon, Coit Tower, a Chrysler spire, Boards of Trade, pearl studio

of the imagination; Moderne & rippled radiators anchored in the obsolescence.

City of the aborted future, shroud of parallax. Then a shifting of winds, of gears

grumbling through transmission, a tuning light as the bus angles away from sunrise.

The refraction of glass refocuses form against sky & the phantom polis evaporates

at the edge of night. Less than hallucination, more than semiotic ghost. What’s

lost is nothing as tangible as your uncomforting seat, or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• Cartografía de Noche
• *
• **
• ***
• Notes
• About the Author