Wednesday, August 13, 2025

Future perfect June 20, 1982

 


Chrome and steel shine in the sunlight like the bright pages of a photo album full of tender, maybe bitter memories.

I stand, the heat passing through me, my camera to my eye, light, confused, defused, transposed,

Through the lens I see, not what is, but what might be, some future when I am among the elders, confused with memories that had not transpired yet.

Outside, heat lines glisten, a baby sprawled on a lawn, I seeing these things in black and white, all lines, all linear, horizontal, sometimes vertical.

The pattern of this existence is beyond my ability to convey with words, I paint it all with my camera, capturing the image of the giggling baby, and the strokes of sunlight on the passing trains.

Then, I am inside my camera, the heat scalding as I press myself onto the film, shaping the lines I see like a sculptor,

Light etches reality out of darkness, perhaps all an illusion, no baby on the lawn in Portland, just a image of a man I think is me.

The shutter snaps like a guillotine, slicing away reality, spreading the pieces on the ground as if crumbs of bread for pigeons to eat,

While I think of the elder years, the life I do not yet know I have lived, the illusion that lets me forget the journey, capturing it all on film I might never see.

The lines that linger, the flashes of light, we reprint, a future perfect we have yet to live.


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