- Velvia 50
- For Maggie M.
- it’s been almost nineteen years
- since we had sex and then
- excitedly got out our cameras,
- and took these pictures of each other
- that i’m looking at now because
- i told the story to my girl upstate
- and she wanted to see them
- as if by means of a cosmic secret
- disclosed to Man in a covenant with
- some merciful goddess of photoalchemy,
- Velvia 50 takes green and bronze
- and somehow fuses them together
- into one greater color
- Paul Simon wrote a song
- about how Kodachrome
- (another slide film)
- aided him in more happily
- recalling the past,
- which is all a very neat lesson
- in memory and sentiment
- this one, however, behaved differently
- with respect to the flow of time,
- reflecting instead a few verdant moments
- of that which was eventually to be
- you called me “beautiful”
- and not “handsome”;
- you said:
- “you’re my favorite person in the world
- right now”,
- a line that impressed me enough
- that i committed it to memory;
- i invoke it now when i’m feeling
- powerfully feminine
- while somebody is fucking me
- and i want them to feel
- as lucky as i did with you then
- in my picture you’re bottomless,
- grinning in your green-bronze floral blouse,
- reaching after beams of L.A. morning
- against the picture window that looks out
- onto a tangle of highways
- that flow northeast
- to caress the edges
- of Mount Washington
- you are gilded with highlights
- and are otherwise dark,
- because my metering
- was less accurate than yours,
- and i used the reading on faith
- without compensating for
- the sunlight that shone down
- into my bedroom on the canyonside
- i have held three tenets of photography:
- shoot everything on Velvia 50, because the colors are so enchanting
- match a different film stock to each setting, like the professionals do
- shoot everything on Velvia 50, because the colors are so enchanting and what do professionals know?
- i wonder what you knew
- i had no idea i was a woman then,
- but i wonder,
- as you were looking down through
- the ground glass of your Hasselblad
- at the morning light around me,
- if you saw one