Archive of New Mexico Poetry – Valerie Martinez

Camera Obscura

“For there is a boundary to looking.
And the world that is looked at so deeply
wants to flourish in love.”
Rilke, “Turning-Point”

For a moment there is no periphery:
the pupil, inky and pooling,
up against telescopic glass, fixes
on the planet, perfectly-etched,
a chalky-ash, eye launched
upon mirrors and lenses, eye
traveling and transfixed.

I step away so others can look.
Step away to the present hour,
bitter cold, numbness in my hands,
one eye wandering the distant
hills, moonlit, one eye stunned
still as a glass relic.

Is it love? Love of the world
now collapsing to a mote,
a shrinking place in the expanding
universe, now at this very moment
in the crater of the heart?

I ask to look again:
I cannot believe the crush
of distance. There it is,
like a schoolbook drawing, Saturn,
past the eye’s first boundary, brimming
on the second, not even near
the sight of a stronger lens,
the disheveled astronomer at four a.m.
bent over an eyepiece, looking out
of the knowable world, and shuddering.

It is all boundaries converging.
And looking, as I shudder,
in my breathlessness, a kind of disbelief,
I find the love of loves.

Later, in a bed beneath all those layers
of light years, beneath cosmic dust,
galaxial bent light, comets, ozone,
fir trees, smoke, cabin roof,
we revel in the nearness of what collapses
and meets. No measurable space
between us, molecules crushed
to the periphery of our bodies,
the planet compressed to my eye,
swallowing breath from your mouth–

distance collapsing, distance overcome
by science and desire,
distance O distance undercut.

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Nude

Is she lying there where light falters
     in rectangles of brown and bone
as maiden? Is she courtesan, sister,
     slave, wife, student? Has she been paid
to recline so, falling asleep
     like a creature in the afternoon sun,
ankle a point of light piercing? Is she
     somehow nothing of these-new
and capacious in her emptiness?
     Against history, then, so the eye
for once suffers amnesia. She is not
     desire, not mother, not even bits
of negative and positive space, color
     and shadow. No, not animal.
Is she meek? Is she fearsome then?
     Where does the mind’s eye wander
in this numb space. Is this her new redolence?
     She does not exist on the side
of any boundary, nor in the definitive,
     nor for the man’s eye upon her
nor the woman’s field of esteem.
     And while there is all this limiting,
all this blinking out and blanking,
     something enormous fills the landscape,
pure abundance. So it is
     with all we give away at great cost:
paradise rushes toward emptiness.

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Tin Can

Where the metal is is emptiness.
This time, the poem will not fill it.
Gaping, I push down the sullied disk
and try for self-containment.
If there is nothing inside it will be hidden.
The hills do not rise up to it
nor does it make the landscape.
Thus it is unrecognizable.
The poem does not compare it
and it is nowhere mundane.
I walk away from metal like a verb.
I am the nothing of words
and drag the earth beneath me,
an unbearable robe.

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