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Judson Evans

Panopticon

"It is possible to regard a four dimensional body as the tracing of a moment in space of a three dimensional body in the direction ... of time." (P.D.Ouspenski)

1.
He was deaf. Not as young as in the gaudy flesh tones cast by the porn flick. A scar like a second smile above his mouth. He was squatting in a burned out project at the city's edge where he led me up through the smell of marijuana and burned oil, the throb of heavy metal at his skull. Cats everywhere, you could hear them, smell them. A complex system of alarms. I climbed past hallways with bludgeoned doors, dark passages where shattered bulbs still hung in metal cages. And then it was all touch ...

candles on the floor
the shadows
unlace their shoes

2.
Basho met the dare
to combine "8 views" of Fuji
in a single haiku ...
by ingenious side-steps
divide by fog
and a two ton bell ...
the intervals collapse like a fan
snapped
shut

3.
When Jeanne Moreau made Les Amantes with Louis Malle, playing opposite her new lover's camera, the scenes between them ... leaving the impossible moonlit house seen from all sides at once, her white nightgown, the foregone composure of her hair, the foreclosed aperture of the dream of being seen by no one only to study the rushes, the recoil on the cutting room floor

leaving him
mirror by mirror
shot by shot

* * *

Working interior landscape for banks and corporations, the bank of images on the monitor, frame by frame, the parking lot's puddles reflecting November sky, low landscape of cloud mottled car hoods, windshields, then the side of my face, the back of my head oddly insect-like craning its axis. The way he had of showing me myself awkward and up close.

afterhours –
seeing
as the security camera sees
my potential

4.
Basho didn't sweat the Pine of Takekuma despite centuries cut and used for bridge pilings eyes of other poems showed him where it was

5.
Driving past twenty years later, detritus of the rooms, shattered plaster, strips of lathe funneled down a plastic orange flume from the third floor window, where he'd set a wooden owl to scare the pigeons, dumpsters full of decade old desire ...

He gave me a flashlight to find the basement bathroom. Long shabby passage, exposed plumbing, boards across wet sawdust on concrete blocks. Everything came on at once: heat coil, fan, the enormous backstage lights ...

hinged mirror
the body angled
apart

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