| RED PUNCTA Of the foreground, we will not speak. Look past the blotted figures, the stiff line that parts glaucous air from ground’s teeth. Forfeit faces. Alight instead on the twine that screws hands together. Gelid landscape, chromatics at life’s edge, those pant bottoms burnished to peasant gray. Harbin in the deepest of winter: eight stripped trees matching eight individuals on their knees. Close the book, they disappear. Open it, and they’re upright again. A stone turned over, red. Beneath it, what we must speak for. Growing lather sloughed off the dead. |
| RED PUNCTA Three boxy handbags seized from the governor’s house, each sewed from artificial leather, free from ornament and loud buckles. It is class betrayal made visible for all to see, a small exhibition for the townspeople. The only faces in the photograph belong to the three wristwatches, which are arranged carefully, as if recovered relics. The glare on glass disguises the watches’ even pulse, plucked clean of hands. A man’s character, stripped down to what he owns, yields to plain sight. Is easy to tame. Beneath the platform, the Red Guards’ heads push ever so slightly against the frame. |
| RED PUNCTA The revolutionary committee marches back from Harbin’s rail station. A bleached Mao statue, no more than three feet tall takes the lead. All cramped muscle. And two mangoes, encased in glass, each lifted by a soldier. The mangoes are a tribute to the originals: a gift to Mao from the Foreign Minister of Pakistan in August 1968. But too much work for sweetness to yield, so off they went to the workers at Tsinghua University, who spent an evening holding and smelling them, passing each from hand to hand, careful not to let them bruise. One mango gets boiled whole, every worker is allowed a spoonful. But here, in this photograph, the mangos are made entirely of wax, brightly cast, which makes them immune to unevenness. And the negation of tense. There are spectators in the crowds who hold their breath. |
| RED PUNCTA Negative space, forgetting’s lining. The background is where things seethe. Where tung trees tease open the seams of voices. In the far off, shame lifts from ear lobes and cools. See how the background leaks of watery faces that haven’t been rifled through. Such as man in the crowd of thousands, running his tongue over the film on his top row of teeth. Such as the woman, her fatty lids betraying her drowsing. The ones farther off, their heads angled away, saying the unrecoverable. The background is distance, is sight that is long. The friction of the future is folded there. |