Page 24 - WTP Vol. X #2

So to Speak
after photo by Sven Birkerts
Photographers can only invite us to see;
they cannot force us to pay attention,
though the good ones never give up trying. They go here and there, keeping an eye out,
as if listening for their names to be called,
or for something inscribed in light and shadow and texture that is like the first words of a new tongue, afterwards available to anyone.
I might say this leaf went down in flames, trailing smoke. And then I might think
of the fabulous flaming of its last changes, unrepresented in this monochrome image. But then I see (what do you see?) a child, l.r., holding slack reins to a wounded bird.
What of the fact that the leaf is not a leaf,
a photo of a photo, like the unaccounted for: Have you seen this child? A ghost of a leaf,
a radiation silhouette, permanent on concrete. Street art, graffitti, sidewalk expressionism,
a stenciled koan, testament to wind, defiance of wind. Only what is accidental is unique.
I imagine its sidelong predicated skittering. The razor-sharp corrugations of the concrete
I remember now from childhood injury. Impossible not to admit cold melancholy.
I know this neighborhood from dreams’ contortions to marry desire and narrative. The taste of bloody knuckles in my mouth.
A photograph like this is synesthesia’s site
and catalyst, eyes becoming ears for all intents, and skin — torn, bloodied — nothing major, but painful. And that other awakened sense: sometimes the magical child looks right at me as if for permission, or to say, “Last chance.” Everything changes places: the real unreal,
the unreal real. It’s a site for sore imagination. Next time I look the child has turned away
and nothing my eyes can do will turn him back. The determined bird has spread its hurt wing, along with the gloriously feathered other one. There is nothing anyone can say to this boy.
I almost hear him cry out as he takes the reins.
Even the season is multiple: the palmate imprint, curled, is the ice-trapped leaf itself for a moment, so what occurs to me is the tang of late November, hard horse chestnuts in spiky cases, broken open, a memory
of an afternoon, smudged like a bad tattoo, even though the heat to impress the dead leaf’s photo, so to speak, implies summer. Unlike the others, taste and smell become each other all the time; but sight and sound? Memory, language, and imagination? I? You? You could say all the elements come together, or at least the senses do. Or say that’s true but always so and somehow what a person is.
I keep on seeing that bird with a broken wing,
a partly ruined thing, about to tow that child. An analyst might tell me why I see him, about to go against the grain, and worry about him, but I’ll bet it has to do with vulnerability: ours, including that imagined pilot’s, down in flames, trailing smoke. The viewer becomes the view, where the photo lives a third life in the mind.
A painful memory is a thought that got stuck, frozen and seared and inscribed upon the body; my scuffed and bloody knuckles, an early one, were the beginning of a useful understanding: you don’t have to fall very far to be injured
or to learn to want to be taken somewhere else.
Everything changes places: the real, unreal.
A painful memory is a thought that got stuck
to the sidewalk, a leaf inviting interpretation
in the single tongue of memory/imagination, close as the senses of taste and smell, or torn skin, blood, and a hurt boy’s magic faith.
I keep on seeing that bird with a broken wing.
Is the story true? Will it seem so to you? Photographers can only invite us to see
that all things accidental are unique.
They go here and there, keeping an eye out. They know the neighborhood from dreams,
true in their way and somehow what a person is. Next time I look the child has turned away.
17
RichaRd hoffMaN