Camera Obscura

That the airplanes blinking in the sky at night

Witness to the possibility of motion—

What of it? Would you have said they were mere

Projections of mine, I had shot every night

Across this darkening dome above me?

And, thus, that through such perceptions

I myself allow the pin-dots sparkling

Across the maps, to which they fly?

From these ubiquities whereof you speak,

I could build my own theater to screen

The graffiti-stained bridges under which

We ran and smoked, and imaged larger lands,

Or some scintillating city in a European dusk

Where I could catch you under the impression-lights

And the majesty of an Old-World snow—

—the legion of You: burnt-faced Aryan, lashing

The inconceivability of youth in the ivy-halls;

Brown-haired Pleiad, whom the Academics painted

Nude, and who ensures her angles are constant

Non-Euclideans. And you, nymph, of red hair

And the taste of Spring orchards, who allowed,

With the ether sourced from her jade silhouette

The winds to diverge and cast

That certain, inexplicable afternoon air.

With whom did I watch these pictures?

The screening was far too private, the lights

Dimmed long before the scenes were shown.

And, in truth, I found no plot, even as the colors

Rained through this pale cone of light

That stretched above me like the galaxies

Elongating from their singularity.

And how was it, then, that you I watched

Even though our seats were adjacent?

It must have been improvised—here,

You ride snow mobiles through some late

Forest trail. (when was this? You shush me

And go on watching) Now, the beach,

The Caribbean, and you, under a

Sand-spawned tree, shells ‘round your neck

And the infinite azure framing you

From above. The scenes evolve, and once more

I’m walking across these stills of you

And You offer me your flesh to taste

And citrus-fused perfume to smell—

—but it shifts again, and in

The fading light I turn and see

You—amorphous You—like shadows

Grown upon the fall

Of the sun, molding

Fantasies from privation. But You—

—Golden You,

Pleiad You,

Ethereal You—

Dance behind the screen, and I see,

That I had cast these rays

Who caught You, and where our shadows

Were entangled.

But the show is over, and

In the dark the stills are void,

The screen falls into subtle shades of pale

Behind which only dance things

Invisible.

I had seen the airplanes wandering through the universe

And how we lay across the midnight fields,

Watched their lights pass overhead, and cast

Such possibilities upon the contours of the world.

You had threaded such, I see, but here

It was only pantomime, masks of the faceless,

And in the empty theater I sit

Dried, dimensionless, and too terrified to turn

And see what had projected my blunt façade

Onto the empty screen.