Unit of Measure, and: Expenditures, and: Memory Soldier

Unit of Measure

Bees keep no appointments.They rasp open the lid of each dayto dip into fool’s filling.

Meanwhile, there are those in templeswho bring the breath to the body’s surface:their sit-bones molded to buckwheat cushions,their spines upright as if heldin suspension by fishing rods.

On Kawara, who mixed freshhis reds, blacks, and blueson each day’s rimthen set time in its casingwith the slim sewing of pencil and then brush.

Oh, motion sickness of the minute handthat came centuries after the hour —trimming the day down to property and to size.

To fill time or to decant it?

That which must be ingested undiluted —

Which passes from my body to yours.

Expenditures

Soft, that tear of water. Which signals dreaming’s lowboiling point. I draw down my eyelids, turn my head.

  Here, the camera fuzzes. What remains out of focus      is the foreground, the waking forms.

  Patterns arise in the sediment: when the eyes adjust,    they’re met with the stutter of faces seasoned.

        In Anhui, my birth province:    my unconscious picks up the interference

  of my relatives’ dream language, of images that abide      in them. I am closest to their blood

          when my memories dream      of theirs, and vice versa, ad libitum.

The relatives here can’t afford self-pity.If they’ve jotted down lines of verse, I’ve never seen them.

We carry some of the same nerves in the body,but not the sense of how to exhaust history in ourselves.

Through time’s heavy membrane, mutual recognition presents complications.Offerings of money, still the shared tongue.

It’s the hands and arms they want me to live inside,but I take as my home the head.

And how can I be trustworthy with this mouth,with its tin roof of American English?

To aunts and cousins who speak at me with speed, I lend an ear.I can’t figure out the source, just the base sentiment.

I distance them at Wuhu train station, where their faces stay.Days later, I found words dampening against the page.

Memory Soldier

In June 2020, the photographer Li Zhensheng dieson a hospital bed in Queens, New York, of a cerebralhemorrhage, at the age of 79.

A torn color. That red of clots, flags, armbands. Of ropesof firecrackers that irradiate the past. Of eardrums, blasteddoors to the mind. Of all that drains from opaque masses.

With the passage out of life, memory images spill over anunspoken margin, dragged across from the warm retinalcurrents of those who remain. And carried off is the purestof memory, anterior to image, which once swarmed likeriver water between the red banks of him.

Boyhood: he worships films with such fervor he pays forcinema tickets by collecting the aluminum of toothpastesleeves. Brushing profligately, at times, to amass moretubes, much to his grandmother’s alarm.

Times when he couldn’t afford a ticket, he stood outside ofthe cinema just to listen to the sound of the film playing.There, his imagination grafted to the movement at thesource of what he heard. When his friends emerged fromthe theater, he pressed the damp skin of their version ofthe film against his own.

Years later, as a government-backed photojournalist, hemade his own theater in cellulose nitrate.

For every propagandistic photograph he published, heearned eight frames of film. The photographs that wouldnever get approved, he slipped into paper envelopes.Surplus hardening to archive.

The O of one mouth agape, of many eyes agape, ofcountless overlooked ruptures, deposited on the emergingprint.

By the close of the Cultural Revolution, there wereapproximately thirty thousand oil-cloth-wrappednegatives hidden beneath his parquet floorboards.

The white and black sediment of Mao’s great disorder underheaven.

Theater requires domestication, a taming, of its spectators.But here, in Li’s photographs, the spectators are alsosimultaneously the actors, well-versed in plot points thatclick into place...