Self-Portrait in a Cell Phone Camera
by Julianne Neely
after John Ashbery’s "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror"
As I see it, like a fault line cracked. From each side, we see things,
camera obscura. I took my photograph, wrongfully surveilled woman.
A polytechnic inscription of my breasts, right and left. My
picture awash with audiences, aphrodisiac in the sea.
An album of openings and me, still, taking everything seriously.
At least in a critical sense, composing a serial and mutinous document.
A follower called me with concern,
I saw you in the water, she said, but your organs were missing.
In the phone, everything appears too soft to exist.
Have you seen me across the tile, across the stovetop, across our mutual misfortune.
One shared responsibility in the deconstruction of the icebox plum.
Few industrial revolutions remain.
Nude, sculpted, and starved. My body,
crawling heavenward. Lack of sail and sag.
The dissection splayed like petals.
There is a hand between me and resurrection, foam enters the light of everyone in
that ocean. Nothing will halt virality, no colliding
of energized particles and airborne spaces. The mirrored hall,
the television fuzzes up in the moonlight, static of heartache.
White noise picture, static shock, shuck, standing still
as the news- shock expires, nothing static, everything shockingly new.
Hot shock sprawled out over evening television.
The solar flare hits the earth’s surface
as a skinny girl waits a table. From the window, she thinks
the sunset looks worthy as it burns the concrete parking lot.
She thinks about the picture she will take of it.
Click. Flash. The sun captured in all its glory.
Post-apathy, post-apex, post-apiculture, post-apocryphal,
post-apology, post-apotheosis, post-appalled, post-
apparition, post-appeasement, post-appreciation,
post-apprehension, post-post-endings. Being still
does not feel good. On the other side, of sunlit
particles, over cracked faces, light lingers over pure shape.
Stand still with bent heads and necks.
Unbraid your veins into one long tendril. Do not
let knowledge of the wire pollute your eyes,
there is no telephone line. The swallow sits on the sky.
I am staring up at me, I am sitting. The poem is begging,
broken in places, the clear cut between what was and what is, its ability to create
dichotomies. My body looks empty
with the bruises brushed out, so tenderly edited. At length every angle, with fingers, hands, arms,
in torsion, torque applied to fix the flaws, reverse the ridges, ripples, wrinkles, undo the furrows.
Unsmiling linear mouth. The tempting glass around a fire alarm.
The sheer volume of it all. I come with all the pleasures of being
human, the responsibilities.
Who is more exhausted than me? Photos broken; the gesture suspended in the air.
My online alter-ego. A headache begins above the right eye.
Sooner or later the whole head will fail.
Mask and feathers. Attracted to it like dust to an attic-stored photograph.
Remember you are dust.
In a cathedral there is no I reflection in the stained glass.
Drawing the eyes upward, there are martyrs captured in the tint.
Not so different from people, alive. Worldwide surveillance, distorted stories.
Media’s high priests. Life preserved
in the windows speaking to me, a woman, insignificant.
Molded in your image. 60-inch television.
More than light in the temples. Near-sighted. Specs to see.
Over-succinct enunciation. Sentences
punctuated with a pause.
Pronouncing each syllable as if I invent the words as I speak.
Ashbery did this better, analyzing the self.
My body relaxed, my limbs weightless, I float
in a cool blue. The narcissism
to think I can do this like him, to look at myself and see what a man sees of himself in a mirror,
in a poem, in a historical painting.
A crew member seats the woman in front of an audience.
She observes the filming of an action.
Movement amongst spectators. Voices unheard, you see?
Bending over an open mouth, smudged little mirror.
Ashbery was once the best at what I do,
and I see the way he looks at me when I lift the phone up high.
I think he might want to stay, watch me take another.
I am him and here to die
inside of a poet’s dream. My reflection winking
through the camera. Top lip a little fuller than the bottom, stretching over crooked teeth.
A tilt to my dark brown eyes.
Walls create artwork. Veins are too cramped beneath the skin.
In the photo she cannot draw a breath, auto-erotic asphyxiation.
A world without oxygen ethers out and it’s easy to play dead.
The weight of my desire is a great disturbance to those sensitive
of images. The art breaks upon the body.
In front of the mirror, oh lord, just long enough to see that I am papery-skinned, hunchbacked,
rumpled, bad back, and twisted knees. I leap into it, everything reflected everywhere.
Small and delicate, great square heads, a consequence of the law of physics.
Heaven gone into error. The itching gone. The absence of sensation.
with calm certainty, I think I have no body at all. Waterless and rundown.
What you think is the smell of rain, is rot.
What you think of pain, it is.
Shivering with sound and motion, writhes still in brilliant reiteration.
Ashbery, the river man, dead eyes open to us, silent within. Body, suspended.
A picture is a sentence in a newspaper.
A sentence in a poem is a picture.
No name, cells swollen, sloughing into the vast throat of a river.
The voice imagined, trapped beneath glass, liquid breath we give.
My elbow is arrow sharp, clutching tight as blood starts to cool, pool, and settle.
A throat, tongue, heart, lungs, and liver removed. A piece of my spine, intact
rib, and a bone from a pinky finger. Dry blood under nails.
In the chest, somewhere between strange swollen breasts, tense in their elastic, men assess my face.
Wave a meaningless hello, like floating, bittersweet fractal in the head.
Between television and easel, hand-brushes augment.
Overfilled curvature,
truth needs no art, but each object seems true,
full, lacking nothing.
Eyes bespeak, easy girlish quietism. Unmannered imagination.
Life is living you. The photograph
finds you so. All of this is somehow apparent
of certain lines around a mouth, certain microbladed etchings in a brow.
And from hands, mapped by calluses, that even in stillness, seem without rest, searching for signposts, en route
to the next task. And so the still hands,
or rather the still itself, becomes a film viewed, a moving picture
as they say, whirring quietly in the cinema of memory.
Except the eyes. Only these are off limits.
Perhaps it is the angle of the camera,
the photographer racing to capture.
Perhaps it is the guarding of the self,
the retreat of the subject: not me, surely not me.
There is no need to look at the camera.
Even caught unaware,
you are prepared.
Even in contour
and still I see you.
We will be buried
with our hands crossing our chests.
But for now, I make my hands in the shape of a crown, hold them over my head.
Picture of a girl in a locket, a trace, a stone.
I polish the stone, carry it in my pocket, wear it
around my neck. Flashy
photoshopped magazines lining grocery store checkout lines.
Inch by inch, mutilation. The outward visible sign. I love it.
Turn my head to the wall and stare. The open windows are not open, they are exhaling.
Murmuring a rhythm of focused attention.
The actor unfolds the intricates of the body. Mirroring flight
and fun. Studied gestures. Both everywhere and nowhere.
Hear the story: it’s in the hands.
How do I look? You laugh. I look around. I look across
the bones of my bare feet, muscles taught on tiptoe.
Visual creature, nude leaning over the bathroom sink to brush my teeth.
You can see the image forming in the depth of a man’s mind.
Sexual versus sexual.
I practice precision, compare my crushed head to another’s.
I think of everyone turning away.
I am in on the joke, through slits of light, with a quick grin.
I think of me on Ashbery’s wall.
I look amazing.
I am without effort to move.
I raise whatever is below it from the dead.
I watch my insulated blood course through my veins—blue—but not water.