Note on the Etymology of Camera

Jasper Bernes



Shuddering with duplicates or, eyes overcast: any room rented or temporary’s a camera. This a rare skin disease: photodermatitis, Hank and Liselle at the beach on your shoulder, a balcony in fog, a wall with the words SHIT HERE in ketchup. In this way, you are able to live next door to yourself, by truce, for months



Through the viewfinder, a tiny judge consults his notes: f. Aryan root kam- to curve, bend. From room to room, from ether to object to mind to voice, oh boy. Stand there, no over there, that’s it, look up, don’t do that thinking thing with your mouth. And when the big wing tears free, like all the things you liked to look at overexposed



While she’s out buying film, you open the locket she wears around her neck, the chain of which, snagged on a faster part of being, a loose end, broke. There’s nothing in it, not even a picture of nothing, not even nothing’s likeness. Like this, you know that there is room for you in her life, if you can keep quiet about what you know



Inside entire, in feet per second, in Cinemascope, with an elephantiasis of the will and, by fortune, your thesis on the tragic rejected by the Bureau of Entireties? What architecture does not leave itself printed on your skin like a limit: that way physics, this way feeling?



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