Look at these old photos of ourselves,
so pretentiously posed with an eye
to a posterity we turned out to become.
I wonder who we thought was watching,
for whom we captureds in chemicals
and light these thin seductive replica
of selves got up in the relics
of the existential France where
I learned from you about eating out.
What airs we struck, our stares
fixed through swirls of Gauloises
smoke at a bookish void.
You went braless, I bared my chest.
We affected quite wicked looks
which but belied our early gropes
at matching blurry kiss to kiss,
the sweet sequence of surprise
as breasts first grazed breasts
and limbs learnt to entwine.
We do have a mixed history
of emulsions, viewfinders, f-stops.
Do you remember leaving tracks in frost
on bridges and berges as we postured
before the dramatic sites of the lesser Alps?
You wore bohemian coffee-house black,
a silk scarf at your silken throat.
But we never loaded film
and a whole roll of come hither
glances and philosophical smilles
vanished with those shutter clicks.
Juste last week in the Eastern Townships
of Québec, the leaves ablaze and eery
as negatives of summer Kodacolor prints,
we were stuck with Plus-X. There we were,
the autumn at its prime, orange and scarlet
drifts of crazy snow lining the muddy
backroads where we paused to kiss,
fuller more practiced bodies,
snapping shots in black-and-white.
*
Not all readers will recall film, the kind used in cameras, let alone that Plus-X was an medium speed black-and-white emulsion. The backstory need not be told, though it might help to know the settings. The first was Grenoble, in the French Alps, 1966. The second, twelve years later, when this was written, on the shores of Lake Massawipi, in the Eastern Townships of Québec.