ENROUTE TV   ENROUTE FM   MEDIA KIT   AIR CANADA   LINKS   WRITERS'   GUIDELINES	CBC LITERARY AWARDS First Prize Poetry MUYBRIDGE'S HORSE   (p. 3 of 3) 1   |   2   |   3   |   JUL '04 reading the Plaza of Antigua All across the frame, people have refused capture.Their bodies, brief streaks of light across the market’s noise.Bodies arriving at the paper’s surface from the hills as though they’d dropped from the background - clothing filling the frame with contrast. Eadweard uses their blurs.Some have stood, perhaps, for hours, under a certain shadow, and (seeing Eadweard place the wet plate into the camera’s box) have jumped from permanence.Their bodies are ghosts, transparent, building’s bones seeping through grey skeletons, half-exposed on glass. This curve of colour is a woman, arguing over the price of beans.This round whirlwind of white light, a boy spinning in place.This silver banner, a man who’s just exited the frame to walk ten miles back to his village, up the side of the volcano, toward sky.Two specific legs support a burst of light, where a figure has bent to the ground in a perfect semicircle, painting the foreground with waves.The dance of a young woman in a white dress paints a halo behind a fixed, staring farmer.Angelus novus. Eadweard’s finger must’ve traced the gradual background curve of Volcano Agua against the air before framing it in the dry photograph’s top half.He must have positioned the Palace of the Captains General intentionally, so its highest corner just grazes the slope in the background, a meeting of territories.Volcanic throat against stone’s collarbone. Like Eadweard, I’m attempting to fix blurs, to translate motion into language.Like Eadweard, I want permanence, want things named.I lean into the paper’s grain, watching, smell its dust lifting from the book, sunlight falling through the window into the centennial clouds of moving bodies there.This image, traveling the entire North American mainland, over a hundred years of distance, to find me here, in the particular light of a Canadian afternoon. Frame around the image, marking possibilities. Circles of light against the nails. In the picture, round baskets perforate the cloth geometry, balanced on heads, giant nails digging into dirt.Every stall is covered by the tilt of a square umbrella, each reflecting the sun in a white shine.The squares float like prints drifting in the development bath, edges curled from the acids’ work.Your eye can hop from one to another without dipping into the river of bodies. Or, you can circle, move from umbrella to umbrella, around the square. Slip, if you like, from the surface into liquid and lose your boundaries. (The most important time is happening between categories.) Returning to Guatemala City Eadweard’s first entrance was directed by government.He toured the theatre’s façade, church belltowers, the slow, square angles of city streets, left as soon as he could, politely.Made a line toward the densest horizon and disappeared. Unlike Antigua, no ghosts enter his photographs here.Instead, he solidifies bodies.His frames are filled with construction, with grand elements of European neo-classicist statuettes.He’s careful never to allow more than a few bodies into one picture, assuring a certain abandonment, remembering the green heat of villages.He surrounds humans with columns, sculpture, stone.Puts single frames against monolithic cathedrals, legislatures.Rounds shoulders against cobblestones. The walls are armies. A single figure leans into the national theatre’s Parisian steps as though entering an execution, sentinel gateways bracketing his possibilities, grey sky dead.The Banco Nacional pins two men to its entranceway, pillars holding their frames as though the sculpted rock were muscle.The faceless shadow of a sagging figure’s expression stuck to a fountain’s steps like a white gargoyle. A body decapitated by darkness in a black entranceway to the City Prison. Slow square of a man’s back against the Economic Society’s grand hall, spine a rusted hook. The woman’s body seated in front of a Catholic courtyard, holding temples between light hands, whole frame rounded toward the tiled ground.The sadness of curves. At the public laundry, Eadweard focuses on space.The building, a giant O, with water at its centre, is roofless:contains a sequence of identically arched entranceways.Between each, set in the floor, is a round bathtub. Eadweard pours bromide over the glass, wanting the tubs bottomless.There’s something essential about these empty spaces. Something about the round tubs against round doorways.Something about the possibilities of liquid. Elsewhere, Eadweard wants stone, only.Seeks out architectural victims of earthquakes and captures their entropies on film, naming pictures as though the buildings still stood in perfect order. Tree roots loop around fissures in the rock, reclaiming minerals. Leaves move across bricks.The crosses of the Church of Conception enter the earth like bodies.He places a few remaining walls against air, compares them to exploded stones spread across foregrounds. Walls jagged against broken sky.He scratches into the negatives’ lower right corners.Fallen arches, broken bones. At the cemetery, surrounded by epitaphs, Eadweard creates a new city.Tombs line the walkways like shops, grave façades.He puts two gigantic people into his dead metropolis, romanticizing.One standing, back to the lens, hands in pockets, head lifted slightly toward sky.The other, sitting to the left by the exterior wall, blending greyness into a collection of mourning.Both figures are absolutely still. Stuck.The back of the man and the shadows of the sitter.Shut doors. A plaque is centered in foreground, occupying a gravestone without a cross.Perfectly flat white stones surround it.All of its clear letters, in capital type. It’s as though the figures had walked past this language, reading, and then paused, understanding, in middle distance, what their presence meant.The standing man, frozen in knowledge, thinking.The sitting figure staring into a space between himself and tombs, solid angles of knees.Everything about this picture suggesting permanence. The plaque’s dark type precisely balanced against borders: CARRERA, it says. [ ] 1 Robert Bartlett Haas. Muybridge: Man in Motion. Berkeley: U of California, 1976. (3). 2 Haas (40) 3 This phrase is taken from an essay by Hollis Frampton "Eadweard Muybridge:Fragments of a Tesseract". Circles of Confusion: film, photography, video: texts, 1968-1980. Rochester, NY:Visual Studies Workshop, 1983. p. 79. Rob Winger recently moved back from India to Ottawa, where he is completing doctoral studies while writing and teaching his baby boy to crawl. He has published his poetry in Descant, The New Quarterly and Grain. A recent Dawson College graduate, Andreas Deligeorge helps high-school students prepare their portfolios. He aspires to become creative director for his own gaming company. Members of the Jury Winner of the 1969 Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry, George Bowering is Canada’s first Poet Laureate. Poet, novelist and essayist Dionne Brand’s most recent volume, Thirsty, won the 2003 Pat Lowther Award for Poetry. Among her numerous books, P.K. Page’s Planet Earth: Poems Selected and New was recently shortlisted for the 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize. ADD YOUR COMMENTS > letters@enroutemag.net 1   |   2   |   3   |   JUL '04
	© 2004 enRoute is published monthly by Spafax Canada Inc. All rights reserved. FRANÇAIS