The Ghost Photograph

Light is the visible evidence of time transformed by living beings. Its nature draws the eye to color and shape. Or in darkness, to contrasts. On the city at night, a moment. On the moment, one place. A position he inhabits. There, near a corner, at an intersection; lights hang brightly silent. Near a future that aborted. Standing lights and one goes dead. There isn’t any reason. There is a reader.

Near the traces the words here imply. Near a disaster whose ending recurses endlessly upon itself: the residence. A place but not a home. Less formal than an office, and slightly more habitable than the mouth of a crocodile whose jaws are slow misfortune meted out over storms of years until the victim, unconscious and isolated, shall duly and compliantly deliver themselves over to fever, to lost connections, recollections, authors. To words. To skeletal memories like those dead flotillas vaporized in flashtests.

Light is the visible evidence we tried to kill the world. A fossil of it. A place but not a paradise, unless dissected, rendered, traded, enumerated, measured, and displayed. Memory as the dreaming seawrecks of those abandoned vessels, frozen in effigy on a shore whose tide’s strange pulse admits no sailor.

Light is the effigy of death’s gaze, prolonged along the axis of the observer’s lifetime, into and beyond the Sun. It’s the living photograph of the transcendental ghost outside of time.