Equivalents

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 over-    exposed 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