Maxine Chernoff

The cinema is a specific language. — Christian Metz What the body might guess, what the hand requests, what language assumes becomes amulet, which is to say I am carrying your face in a locket in a box to a virtual location guarded by kestrels, suggesting the scene’s geography of love and dirt, trees ripe with darkness and bones’ white luster. In the moonlit blue house, where snow won’t fall unless called upon, grace enters as requested, lands next to you, grasped, as if love were a reflex simple as weather.

I am looking for the photo that would make all the difference in my life. It’s very small and subject to fits of amnesia, turning up in poker hands, grocery carts, under the unturned stone. The photo shows me at the lost and found looking for an earlier photo, the one that would have made all the difference then. My past evades me like a politician. Wielding a fly-swatter, it destroys my collection of cereal boxes, my childhood lived close to the breakfast table. Only that photo can help me locate my fourteen lost children, who look just like me. When I call the Bureau of Missing Persons, they say, “Try the Bureau of Missing Photos.” They have a fine collection. Here’s one of Calvin Coolidge’s seventh wedding. Here’s one of a man going over a cliff on a dogsled. Here’s my Uncle Arthur the night he bought the prize peacock. O photo! End your tour of the world in a hot air balloon. Resign your job at the mirror-testing laboratory. Come home to me, you little fool, before I find I can live without you.

A film is always like a book and not like a conversation. — Christian Metz As I saw your face nearing my face, snow fell through a keyhole and opened the door. We went inside and watched windows wax green and gold. Spring, we decided, was more oppressive than winter with its alyssum and clover and the sheer weight of life crowding us off the page. We stayed in bed for years and took our cures patiently from each other’s cups. We read Bleak House and stored our money in socks. Nothing opened as we did.