The Thing of Nature That Defies or Defers, Rather Than Presupposes, Representation

I’m cool standing, we say to the studio chaise’s cooling board ambition. The photographer sets for a fruitless still life. Attempted portraits of us are inclined to landscape orientation. It isn’t that we’d fish-eye the lens, but that some eyes’ lenses insist something fishy. The shutterbug keeps on checking that the camera’s uncapped. We get it, we get it: though is it we be constricting light, or vacay it to rich space? Photog cocks a new angle, bent on composing what rubatos composure and composition. The kamera kalkulates us as low light; seems we might be a dim holt, in a damp hull, or a damned hole (in it or itself). Though is it we (who) be conscripting eyes, or melee them to sic race? And-a-one, two, three: say cheese! We say life, inclined to insist on checking that constricting, bent low might (damned in itself—sick, too). This very teeming skeeves some, its accommodation of objects into a body, its embodiment of objecthood, we are actor and scene—the frame only part of the production. We quit the sitting, since the work to our living’s an off-camera oeuvre. That surveillance produces the nothing it suspects we are. Please don’t throw me in that periphery, says the rabbit figment.

Copyright © 2021 by Douglas Kearney. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 23, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast 

  

“Some time ago, I read ‘Black Kant,’ an essay by the genius poet and critic, Fred Moten. In the essay, Fred listed sixteen categories which comprised ‘A Natural History of Inequality.’ I like writing poetry sequences, and the list was evocative, so I wrote a poem for each category for to come get up to Fred’s concept. This is the sequence’s penultimate poem. I think that representation, here, is both about being depicted and advocated for. The speaker is aware the photographer in this poem means to misrepresent them but remains trapped in the act of being ‘framed.’ Pun intended.”
—Douglas Kearney