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Jude Rosen

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The Negatives

Jude Rosen reading The Negatives 2088.3 KB
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Dear F.

You don’t want to go back over old territory
but I am – going back – to Italy, the Northern
cities, Rome and Sicily, to be a guide
and I need the photographs.

They are the only traces of our being there
that bear witness to the broken rock, the pillars
at odds with rectangular history,
my camera lucida that filtered us through
the special southern light, burning us
into the dialect and terracotta, laying us
together, tongue and groove, on the pantiles
– our creased sheet – lengthening
our shadows beyond the city walls.
For you, it’s archive, for me, retrieval.



Dear J.

The spaces are simpler than the words for me,
as you know ... but the photos fill the gaps.
Of course, you should have them back
but I cannot give them up lightly –
they carry too much freight.
I have never been back to Italy since.

The light would hurt my eyes without your shade,
the noisy operetta on the street would seem
an untidy plot I could not see through.
No-one would find cannoli to console me
with their sudden candied fruit.

Here are women who wheel their prams
in tree-lined streets at 10 at night in Syracuse
– another Sicily – a man who shares his city’s secrets
leading us into Dionysus’ Ear so we catch
the slaves’ lament reverberate and then
to the Greek amphitheatre for acoustic proof
the sea-breeze blew the actors’ words back
to the audience, on the watch for sea attack.

This is your take on Italy: the silver nitrate
fix you shared with me.
You were the magnet that drew me there
to another kind of science … of civil life.
I will make copies of the photographs.

Jude Rosen lives in London and works as a freelance researcher on urban cultures and citizenship, and as an interpreter and translator.

Page(s) 72

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