Somewhere the Photos in a Clear Plastic Moving Box
Photographs are a writing of light. Photos graphein.
and:
Perhaps
the greater responsibility lies
with poetry, in any arrangement with photography
(rather than vice versa), to
sort through the inaudible signals before speaking up.
C.
D. Wright
Pictures
Never Taken But Received
Since moving from one town
to another one house to
another I’ve kept
the photographs in a box in the
attic
at the north end I couldn’t
tell you what box exactly
and one of these days I’m going
to have to find them before
someone else does but I’ve put
that
off because what do I do
with them once I do
find them again I remember
framing your face your chin your
eye
lid filled with what all the beaten
are filled with blood and
suffering
probably and it was all you could
do
lay sedated and cut-lipped
and when the exposed tissue pooled
its shreds and too much nerve
there was a gauze pad to dab it
with
who but me speaking of nerve
had the balls to walk
along the side of the rail and
raise
the flash ass to appetite ass to
elbow throat to
swollen mouth hole (though enough
for one small straw) and those two
raccoon
bruises through and through your
eye bones
you know those photos you never
want
anyone to ever know about but you
know
if you’d never taken them they
would never be
believed like walking through
two or three years before you
were beaten the burned out bedroom where you
huffed pure air remember I stepped
in
the cooling pool of sooty fireman’s
water
if I’d never taken all that into
my eye
and froze them there in black
and white (it seemed the right
medium
at the time) who would have known
there was a home there
at all where we all grew
in and out of tune to the music
of amitriptyline morphine oxy
and your sleep the sleep of one who sleeps
it off absences I’m
sure
that’s what you intended to do
once you were able
to stand and glare at the blue
blue you
naked you made your next two
or three moves and the edge
of the bed was in the exact spot
your muscles knew off by heart
like a recitation of some act
of contrition right
had he never found you there would
never
be these squeezed with easier
moments photos (I remember telling
the 1 hour clerk there was a crime
done
to you and not to be alarmed the
police
were already involved you were
my mother and barely
hanging on at the hospital
up the hill she said she
understood did she
understand
I dropped
the film off I went back an hour
later it was a hot June day
blue and not a cliché cloud in
view
