“An Inconceivable Figure in Time” by Elisa Gonzalez

As we celebrate Latinx/Hispanic Heritage Month, we honor the diaspora’s rich contributions to, and profound influence on, arts and culture in the US and beyond. This four-part poetry series invites four Latinx poets to explore and respond to a work in MoMA’s collection.

“For several months, I’d been trying to write about dance, but kept losing my way,” says Elisa Gonzalez. “But the obsessive repetition of Muybridge’s frames called to me, and I saw potential to explore both dance and photography.” Gonzalez is a New York City–based poet whose work explores problems of temporality, death, stasis vs. movement, and familial relations. “I have been struggling to find new words and ways of approaching poetry since I completed my first collection. In this poem, I hoped to escape familiar gestures and obsessions. I don’t think I did.” Looking at photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s Woman Dancing (Fancy), Gonzalez says, “I see my sister Micaela, a dancer, in the image—whenever I think about dance, I think about her. Maybe it’s impossible to be anything except oneself. Maybe I just have to wait longer.”

Gonzalez joins a number of esteemed poets who have contributed original poems to Magazine. We present “An Inconceivable Figure in Time” in honor of Latinx/Hispanic Heritage Month, which is celebrated annually from September 15 to October 15.

Eadweard J. Muybridge. Woman Dancing (Fancy): Plate 187 from Animal Locomotion (1887). 1884–86

• • •

Pink thud of luggage off my head. Flying object
damage sustained while preparing to leave one apartment for another:
a juddered skull, ankle scrunched catching the suitcase of demonstrative pink.
Someone had to decide the worse—head or foot.
Primitive selection, based on pain.
For months I wondered if I’d chosen wrong, not to admit
the head, when I cherish it as engine
of my whole stupid heady life, cerebration upon cerebration.
Muybridge, after a stagecoach went head over heels with him
inside (smashed up his orbitofrontal cortex): “I had double vision—
saw two objects at once; had no sense of smell or taste; also had confused ideas.”
I told no one about my bouts of replicating images, misplaced or mired
thoughts, as if by failing to raise the alarm at the beginning, I’d lost
all right to complain.
Really it was fear, as my personal study
of boredom has taught me rationale often is.
If something irrevocable has happened to my body, I’d prefer not.
                                                                                                                                          Several times, an editor
invited me to write poems about dance, but I wrote just a few lines
about immobility, pain, and a choreomaniac trapped among lilacs,
or I didn’t write: I sulked in bed amid unpacked boxes, the room’s mazy architecture
prohibiting free movement of the solitary body, and also sex, and when
the Canadian wildfires smeared the city, and I, looking from bed through window,
thought smeared the city, disgusted
by my own banality, I breathed barbecue
for days or longer. Sapped of beauty and grace: a cooked angry thing.
“The poem about dance,” Jamie said, “will also be about your sister.”
Glück: “Of two sisters / one is always the watcher, / one the dancer.”
Micaela: “Well, the watcher is the one who talks.”
Haven’t I been waiting for years to quote this retort?
The poet murders the spontaneity of language.
Samuel Rulofson: “I talked against time.”
The radio: “Micaela se botó, y cuando yo bailo con ella, atrás me dejó.”
                                                                                                                                                            No dancer am I.
Verdict on wallflower life: not so bad as movies depict. I am glad to watch,
though sight isn’t one of my gifts: a weak observer of art,
I don’t translate image to word, the words already that when I receive them.
Often the ones who rush the floor pity my stationary position, their breathless ecstasy convincing them that ecstasy is ecstasy is ecstasy.
Some do see that stillness is also a dance.
The motion that fascinates me is either as mindless or as close
to mind alone as it can get. Micaela when studying choreography: a figure quieted
by concentration, unmoved, quick spikes of a limb, twitch of a shoulder, a finger,
to teach the body how it feels to replicate what the eyes catch,
and it is in this procedure that I see
myself, in that definitional embodiment of sibling: Who is not me is me.
My God. Move a leg, move a line. There we go, girls.
Miss Yo poked the little ballerinas with a pencil to correct.
Micaela hungered, lengthened, lifted. The pencil prods.
In 1981, Miss Yo “looked ethereal” in Les Sylphides,
a dance without plot. Just these ethereal spirits like children
disguised as ghosts, and the Poet
as barycenter. “Violence is intrinsic to ballet,” Hannah said, looking at her past.
Across any floor whirls beauty and violence, there you go girls, double vision, as I believe I am supposed to see.
                              A curator has already laid the collotype, plastic-sleeved, on the table
when I enter after washing my hands, twice singing my A-B-Cs to show respect
to the age and rarity of plate number 187, Woman Dancing (Fancy).
I sit down at the table. She sits at the desk directly behind my chair, facing toward me,
so that throughout my experience of seeing I am conscious
of, if not being seen, then being watched, or if not being watched,
then being visible—here I am, acting the Poet.
Animal Locomotion anonymizes the dancer, Model 12.
In six books about Muybridge, Model 12 gets no other name.
But in a Facebook post on February 3, 2021, Dan Streible protested
Getty Images’ misidentification of this dancer as Isadora Duncan, when really
she’s Kate Larrigan, whom Muybridge described as “a danseuse from New York”
and who, according to a census record for Katie Larrigan, maybe her
maybe not, was seventeen in July 1885
when she twirled in a room all black except a thin white grid overlaid
to ease the measurement of physical characteristics.
Forty times he took her, at maybe seventeen.
Beyond the photograph, a tree untangles from a roof in the window.
I do not know what I should
be seeing.
                            Photograph, words—do they
have anything to do with one another?
Barbara Guest: “I wish to change the filigree of our subjects.”
When I see a dancer dancing, I can’t not see my sister.
The particular like weeds overtakes the general.
8:15 p.m.: I text Micaela asking her to replicate Kate Larrigan’s movements.
8:17 p.m.: I receive a video with the answer. It’s a joke, a parody, “I’ll do it better tomorrow.”
Continuous flow of the body rendered discontinuous.
Angle of the neck, pattern of the feet, these tell the frame,
and through Micaela I see how much I’d missed of Kate, This is so often
my experience of the body in time, and yet never
do I hate it less.
Guest: “Words / after all / are syllables just / and you put them / in their place.”
This is a burial. What we do to honor dead things.
                                                                                                      In a letter, I wrote about writing letters
as a technology. The only possible time travel. My clock’s not yours. We both know
that. And still from some sad human hope we make the “noise of Time,
which is not sad” (Barthes). “I talked against time,”
Rulofson testified under oath of the evening Muybridge visited
flying apart from the revelation that Flora, his wife, was and had been
unfaithful. It didn’t work, talking to delay: Muybridge made the ferry,
leaping, some said, six feet from shore to deck, and because he made the ferry,
he made it to the house where he made the shot that killed the lover.
                                                                                                                                            Charon at the Ferry,
Muybridge titled a photo of himself in Yosemite years before, leaned against a pier
beside a river that, photographed, shows “the tesseract of water...
not water itself, but the virtual volume it occupies
during the whole time-interval of the exposure” (Frampton).
If I were a dancer, could I grip all this together—the murder, the dance, the photographer
as death’s shabby dogsbody, the Pause of Space (Emily Dickinson)—in my frame?
This poet’s hanging on strangler-tight. And then the hands snap
open, break.
                                            I have never stopped someone’s clock.
Nevertheless, attention is one of love’s poses,
and it can never be undone that I’ve spent hours, days, attending this photo,
brimful of the knowledge that the photographer
shot a man like a man shot my brother, and while my foot and my head
were worrying me—like predators do weak prey—I attended the sentencing
of the living murderer, and for a flash I pitied him, I wept for two men.
And now for three. No, four. And the women, too! For Flora, dead
at twenty-four (natural causes). For Katie, who did dance, was dancing,
is dancing, will dance, died, who knows how or when, is dead, is seventeen,
and Micaela, who leaves me behind, like in that song,
as she spins inside my phone.
You can tell she’s a good dancer because alive she
can pose as awkward as any corpse.
Unless I’m talking, I’m mortal, too. I’ll never see you again,
I thought upon exiting the viewing room and the curator typing to her own time.
The particular bleeding all over the general again.
                                                                                                                La suppression de l’absence,
that was to be photography’s cure
once upon a time. “The ghost will walk,” a journalist predicted
after Muybridge released motion from images shot to still.
When he took spirit photographs, just a few,
he boasted their fakery. First the wife
haunted the house, then the husband: lovers trading gauzy impermanences
by double exposure, a series called Heartsease.
It is not that a photographer is always a murderer
or that a poet is always tossing limericks at death.
                                                                                                                May she get to the end,
a friend who dances writes of the dancer in a letter. Shadow of the dancer’s hand
crosses the dancer’s body. Would it be possible, and not too much work,
a woman calls out, then nothing else. Silver and light. Silver and light.

• • •

Elisa Gonzalez

Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her work appears in the New Yorker, Paris Review, New York Times Magazine and elsewhere. The recipient of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, she is the author of Grand Tour (2023).