"Review."
These people in the photo of the war and their babies
look like dirt and rags and dirt.
All fell but especially the babies,
who fell into the earth the way they had always
fallen into shoulders, into sleep,
with small, complete weight.
You understand that the bodies are dead
because of the angles elucidated by the photograph.
You are not convinced that the stillness is not
the stillness of a photograph.
As the photo suggests, you conflate
what is rag, what is dirt, what is body.
You put yourself in there, even in babies,
and the angles your body can't do, even with yoga.
The other reason you know they're dead
is it says as much on the little card next to the photograph.
You have come to an exhibit of photographs that
has been praised for breathing.
The reviewer stopped short of announcing that the pictures
make the war come to life.
He composed the review after visiting
an ex-lover in the hospital, a sculptor who, quote,
"remained in a vegetative state."
In the hospital, he tried to concentrate
on the sheet veiling her and not the memory of her body.
She had been a sculptor on her way to revitalizing classicism.
They lived in an apartment with her resin figures.
He had been a photographer losing faith
in his own artistic promise.
Her stillness was hard to take.
He remembered the camera he loved,
a Nikon he'd saved up for in 1965
and still brought out sometimes, usually alone in his apartment,
usually after several drinks.
Once, he'd found a mysterious roll of film
among the pieces of fruit in a bowl on his countertop
and had it developed.
On it, objects in his life had been rendered monumental.
He had not had children.
He had not gone to war.
He had not made good art, but when
he looked at the photograph of his kettle,
he found it difficult to breathe.