Ellipses and Semicolons

All people start to
come apart finally
and there it is:
just empty ashtrays in a room
or wisps of hair on a comb
in the dissolving moonlight.

it is all ash and dry leaves
and grief gone
like an ocean liner.

when the shoes fill with blood
you know
that the shoes are dead.

true revolution
comes from true revulsion;
when things get bad enough
the kitten will kill the lion.

the statues in the church of my childhood
and the candles that burn at their feet
if I could only take these
and open their eyes
and feel their legs
and hear their clay mouths
say the true
clay
words.

We see in the photograph the past as passing away, we see time’s movement. The photograph ceases to be an image that freezes time. True, it is a still image like paintings, but in contrast to them it does not show us a frozen and a-temporal image.

The photograph shows us temporality: the fleeting, ever changing, forever escaping moment, it is not “outside” time, but rather it carries time in it, or cuts time’s linearity. The photograph shows us the ephemeral nature of things, a nature that we tend to forget, or suppress (in handling things as though they will be there, always accessible).

If we describe what we see in the photograph solely through the language of state of affairs “it was Tuesday afternoon, she wore red” we lose sight of the particularity, we affix what we see and restrict it to the domain of the past. And the photograph, although showing us the past, really reveals the present as retention of the past, and the present as already past.