This past week in London I took a photo very similar to this one--I guess you can't teach an old dog new tricks, or maybe my heart always seeks out the same frames. Something like that. But this time it's horizontal, and there is more space to the right of the wings, and something about it, about the cropping, about seeing the wings and the wall and the tranquility, the utter calm, it creates...well. I don't have words. But I would happily borrow someone else's. This poem isnt' perfect--were it up to me, I would remove the following words: whore, nostril, bowel. But I didn't write it; I'm just borrowing it. The bit that kept running through my mind as I looked through the viewfinder and then at the LCD, as I closed my eyes and pictured it, knowing full well that I'd taken the same photo before, is the last full sentence. You'll see what I mean, I think.
Hey Sweetie
by Albert Goldbarth
The things we call women! housewife, honey,
whore. The things we call the night: O
Mother of Terrors, Soft, Black, Velvet
Horse's Nostril I Worm Through. Braille
Rainbows Under The Blanket. Names telling
more about the namer.
*
Often as a child I needed a star
to fall to sleep by. A dimestore "night light"
in the shape of a fish. A Flash Gordon Glow-In-The-Dark Ring.
Or: the years my sister shared my room
I told her a bedroom story each night--
the dependency of binary stars.
*
Well it is night, and somebody's called for.
What the iced-up bowel of fear does to a businessman
flying, I have no right to guess. But he's
blanched and sweating. And she's a figure, really,
between wings. There's a stew light. In the dark he calls her
angel and who's to say he's not right.
2008-10-11 - 7:49 p.m.
