How Photography Has Changed the Human Face

1
This is a monument to the number one.
This is your face in the glass.
This is someone you’d never recognize.
This is someone who died.
Cry. You’re supposed to cry.
It shakes the house, shatters the windows
in a storm. Story in the film
locked in.

2
And what therefore has
happened to the face
You pass
incised
it used to be undone
and on and on
and we would say
or would have said
Recognize it anywhere
While here
it is replaced by one

3
It’s a moving scene
You pass
and the window frames
for a fraction of a minute
a passing face.
The last of the sun is warm
and yours
was all in your hands.
We have overcome
our objection to the past
Please stay.

4
There is a play of light and shadow. A room that runs
parallel to this room and when you leave the room, a slight
click and you turn. One distinct face and the crowd, multiplying.
There are others still inside, but they are interior
things; they wither in the light.
If the images refuse to move.
The face you know, distilled from what you don’t.
The difference lives on, finds a life of its own.
Don’t return.
I counted to one. Stretch out your arms. Straight in
front. Place it there.
Later it will be a picture
and no one will be breathing
and no one, said the guide, has ever been here. We
made it up by heart and we put you in the photograph.
Look, you belong. What will you become. We chose it all
by hand and every detail binds. Close your eyes — it
photographs the sky.

5
And once and once and once
the power of light to break
to stain
and drown.
Scythe. Simple. What did you want?
Why did you come?
When the new world is primarily sound and
we thought you’d last forever
in that incredible light.

6
But it wasn’t your face.

7
See in the picture the man crossing the bridge. He doesn’t
look like us. When you were a child you trusted everyone —
I remember, you’d go up to strangers and your arms would
take over. Now, in the photograph, you look blind; you have
that impenetrable look in your eyes. They are your eyes, but
the arms belong to the man crossing the bridge. They alone
are alive. Look at them again — see that electric thing that
rivets them to the scene, see how they tremble every time I
speak, see, you are there in the background; you are looking
on; you are watching a man in Canton cross a narrow
bridge and every time I speak, see.

8
In this photograph, everyone is here and they are happy
and the sun is shining directly into their eyes so they have
raised their arms, each an arm, each a hand to shade their
eyes and the shadow cast (which is the whole point of the
gesture) makes it impossible to tell who they are.

9
Light cuts
while you hold your breath
my pulse around, turn around my
And you are.
How simple then, you see we can sleep
through the future
like we planned.