It was a sentimental time in my life & I carried my Leica with me everywhere
Its silver fittings blacked-out with electrical tape just the way I’d seen Cartier-Bresson’s
& I only listened to the best so when Frederick told me don’t read Freud & I asked Why not?
He’d said You’ll end up just like me every time I say “soul” I really mean “libido”
I wasn’t worried & I’d pinned on my wall a wrinkled proof he’d tossed out—a nude of X—its
Surface scarred by wood tongs as he’d yanked it up out of its bath a little drunk
I loved that shot & the near erasure of skin lightly overexposed so her body
Rippled into currents of light as she held up an empty & bent rectangle of brass
She’d saved from the trash pile in their studio lifting it level with her breasts
To frame a whole century of assumptions she’d already begun dissolving in her
Own radical revisions of the light—a porous sculpted skull & horse collar of pelvic bones
Bleached whiter & more luminous than any negative cold zero of the desert night