How long had it languished, erotic in the stalls of oil paintings and furs cryptic as the decrepit hutch where rabbits are generations gone? How well hid in the warrens of the flea market, then deeper as if back into the camera’s aperture, suddenly abloom as a daisy in the cemetery dirt that nurtured it. Some wan, anonymous beach, no signal if Cap Coz or Côte des Basque, it was all her: cuffs rolled (she must’ve been wearing his trousers), grayish hair a wing, fisherman’s sweater, glimpse of cheek, a privacy signed Leo Brisbois in grade school loops, deep pencil. He’d hung back, amber in its black barrel rolling one frame into the future. Waited as it bathed, gave it ivory mat. Valium to see it, like that Janis Joplin interview, her shy responses, her embarrassment in explaining how she sang from “the bottom of the music.” Her little girl teeth, how softly remarkable they seem, these sincerities.
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