Maxine Chernoff Poems

Even as an embryo, she made room for "the other guy." Slick and
bloody, she emerged quietly: Why spoil the doctor's best moment?
When Dad ran over her tricycle, she smiled, and when Mom drowned
her kittens, she curtsied, a Swiss statuette. Her teachers liked the way
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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
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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
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The cinema is a specific language.
— Christian Metz

What the body might guess,
what the hand requests,
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a voice speaks

to rheumy stars

deadpan witness
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Shotgun

blossoming

outward
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Sixty second

August

" a bruised tenderness"
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If I were French, I'd write
about breasts, structuralist treatments
of breasts, deconstructionist breasts,
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Choose a heavy one shaped like (a) your first ride in a car or (b) the Hitchcock leg-of-lamb, served at dinner to the unsuspecting detective. Or a light objet d'art, (c) an ice cube in whose reflection is suggested the history of the subconscious.
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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.
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