Karl Lagerfeld’s Final Collection Visits Niagara Falls
Photographer Landon Nordeman orchestrated a pop–up fashion shoot among tourists enjoying the iconic, kitsch–laden wonders of Niagara Falls. In collaboration with Canadian poet Kaie Kellough, Nordeman has created a style novella that is part documentary, part fairy tale.
camp & splendor
i.
frozen in its noon the sun
beats in the slow niagara foam the border
underwater, invisible, is ignored by shoaling salmon, trout, doré –
prisms speckle the sky, ultraviolet spectrums arc from one
empire to the other
marriott logos flutter
a cloud of tourists roams sky a cerulean mirror
look away pause
blink back a misted instagram filter
veils, unveils this splendor
ii.
rain slicks the lens blurs the image
the image is who is in it is who is
cropped from it, out of the frame is the image
what these words is not saying? is it wordless is it
a lyric gloss over the everyday rain slicks the focus
outside the frame is
what?
what the tourists overlook in their ease, is what they wear at leisure, is
a salmon a pink plastic rain wrap waterproofing sightseers
against the confetti scattering down from the champagne froth over the local waiter
the ticket
takers, chamber maids whose labor weds this motel city
to the national imaginary
iii.
the poem, treacherous as water, soaks into the page
its invisible thinking infiltrates the infrastructure of the image
with a question: if everything is priced, is glossed
is the reflective surface we stare into, expecting, perhaps, to see
some ideal valuation of ourselves peering back from between
sheer curtains cascading to the motel room’s walnut
carpet, next to a no
smoking sticker on the azure door, the wood–paneled station
wagon parked at a nostalgic angle are we also
rusting in the sun
oxidized by the passage of –
iv.
in the rippled lens of a swimming pool glamour sinks, distorted
by water and light as bubbles
wobble under, wobble to the surface to burst, to breathe
a phone booth open the dangling
receiver listless as a slack drowned mouth
inhaling water next to a river of concrete
the white noise of engines idling
v.
one finger points up toward the space needle
the needle threading cloud with its intention, its ambition, the needle
threading the eye the gleaming point piercing the red and white slats of tourist toy sunglasses
made by someone, bought by someone, sold by some
blind patriot? who celebrates nation seizing nature
whose
economy drones over these rocks in a shower of spray – the attraction
sluicing under over the border water’s tariffs paid
by its transparent skin
vi.
at the border between being
local and being water. leisure and dollar. between being
wet and being wrapped. plastic and free between
being background and being a teardrop–
red fingernail pointing up to the blonde
noon scattering into crystal prisms champagne effervescence
stinging
mosquitoes, mist
vii.
if you could pluck light from the sky, buff its glow on your sleeve
take a ripe bite before it dissolves before it leaves
a cloud dripping between your fingers, which dries into a
burnt–orange leaf that curls in your palm flatten the leaf between the pages of a coffee table book
about niagara’s camp and splendor the leaf inserted between an aerial
photo of the falls and an elvis impersonator you wave the leaf
at the intersection of poem
and commodity a vision of drowned glamour surfacing behind
a window and you,
viii.
staring into the gloss is you, contemplating the line between nationalism
and commerce the slanting rhyme where glamour abrades
against nowhere the border churning between
onguiaahra and tourists wrapped in pink plastic
inheritance aligned with conquest history dissolved into –
ix.
volume
the past thunders through a dangling receiver in a bell booth by an asphalt river a language that predates our own
nobody
walks into the booth holds the receiver, like a conch to their ear
stands, transfixed by the ancient grammar voices inside the roar
hangs up
