Le Temps Mort
Now the empty frames, the cream of margins,
the zero of the camera’s eye asleep, on the run.
Morning’s slow mucus, and Sixth Avenue
opened, that strip of vowels and fever silhouettes.
While nerves of metal vibrate beneath asphalt,
registering sensation and ailment,
the action resumes on the other side, is always
resuming, and to this, even the dead yawn
out of earshot, off character. Out of scene.
Keep watching, as only rods and cones remain.
And the only sound is the rustle of metaphors
crying out and the surprise is that nothing
we say or do not say or say again can hold
here in the crush of one thing into the other,
none touching the macula, in other words,
the perfectly ordinary mysteries.
Copyright © 2025 by Jenny Xie. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 1, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“In film, temps mort (‘dead time’) refers to passages of directionless time—time when very little, if anything, is taking place narratively. Useless time. In film and in life, I’m drawn to what gets awakened in these slow, languorous stretches, when the camera keeps on running, even in the absence of legible action, even when actors have broken out of character or walked out of the frame altogether. In the swell of empty time, one’s attentional rhythms get recalibrated, and constellations of meaning that remain hidden to the eye—that immeasurable substratum of the unperceivable—exert their force.”
—Jenny Xie
Jenny Xie
Jenny Xie's debut poetry collection, Eye Level, was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera as the winner of the 2017 Walt Whitman Award, given by the Academy of American Poets.