electric effluvia on the surface and circumference of two coins   Étienne-Léopold Trouvelot ca. 1888 printing-out paper print

BROUGHT TO LIGHT

     for Alan Wick

1.

The new physics: when

was it first minted, the story

and its arc?

2.

When a bit of the everyday

was laid down

before the aperture of the sun,

and brought to light in 1888,

a currency hitherto

unseen: halos and

sparks,

living invisibly within

the betwixt and the between,

faceless

yet tender,

bright as new stars.

3.

Electromagnetism: the discovery

of the day, captured without camera,

on light sensitive paper—

an intimate frontier,

where science and photography met

for the first time, bridging the gap

with a flash,

a blaze across a void,

a branching.

4.

Étienne-Léopold Trouvelot fled

with his family from France in 1852,

avoiding one coup d'etat

to wage his own risky experiment

in Medford, Massachusetts. A stroke

of genius took hold

of this amateur entomologist

and told him he could save

that shimmering filament—

silk—and the burgeoning

industry that was spreading

with great speed in the West,

by cross-breeding one dying moth species

with the resilience and fiery spirit

of another. In his backyard,

on an oak branch, he cultivated, in secret,

the eggs of the Gypsy Moth, whose larvae,

to his surprise, escaped into

the nearby woods.  He notified the authorities

but nothing was done to prevent

the infestation that ensued.

5.

Later this man turned his gaze

from larvae to stars,

to astronomy, to the heavens—

and in seeing the pulse

and magnetic dance of the Northern Lights

fell in love with auroras—

and from an intimate place

within himself went

on to render and capture

in lithographs and photography,

the shape and form of celestial bodies,

their light, their effluvial line.

6.

To this day this man of passion and innovation,

who helped to forge a new science,

is remembered more for the escape

the Gypsy Moth made into North America,

that persists to this day,

than for what he captured in 1888,

by simply setting two ordinary coins

down opposite each other

on a single piece of paper.

7.

This is our portrait also

more than a century later.

We are gypsy spirits,

instars escaping,

into the unknown,

an invisible frontier,

rebelling

against containment,

with so much to say.

We are twin beings,

true light

upon true light,

begotten and betrothed,

one from and to

the other: a love

like a physics, invented

and remembered, at once

and once again.