WEBVTT

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Last poem is the title poem.

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This poem is not
based on a photograph,

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but it uses a photograph to
talk about what, to be honest,

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it didn't know how to talk
about when it started.

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And so the photo is helpful
for it to come back to it.

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But I think the photo
self-identifies in the poem.

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American Children.

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This time when it comes,
it comes all the way

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like a fist to the
throat, only harder.

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Only this time, it
comes from inside,

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the way a plane explodes.

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And what it takes to
step from puzzle piece

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to piece of wreckage still
smoldering on the lake's calm

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face.

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I wouldn't know.

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I wouldn't know because
I'm not in the picture

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of the cab and the cop
and the rubbernecks

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with their hands pressed
together like cheap sandwiches

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are slung from their
pockets like birds.

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Sometimes, they
tsk and look away.

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But the problem is they
have to look at something,

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and so they look at me.

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They think they are
looking through a window,

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but because it has rained,
the window is streaked,

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and all they see, probably,
and a little blurry,

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is themselves, which
is all they are really,

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even in a photograph stalled
at the intersection of America

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in time where these things
happen as we say when there's

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nothing to be done.

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And what I failed to
notice is the chalk

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outline on the pavement so faint
already it looks like a wind.

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If a wind can live in a
photograph, might erase it.

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Even to mention it is
a violation to which

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I am prepared to plead guilty.

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On the day of
judgment assigned me.

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Until then, I am
sentenced to witness

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what Louis Faurer
sentenced to the foreground

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in black and white,
untitled, in 1949:

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a boy in a striped t-shirt.

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He's so skinny he wears his
arms like a straitjacket.

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How cold he must be.

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Each tooth, drilled into
a lip like an Ice Age.

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His eyes are BBs.

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I don't know what to say.

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I don't know what
to say and that

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is the problem of
this poem, which

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is not in fact
about a photograph,

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but about a woman outside my
office weeping in the hall.

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She is not engaged
by photography or art

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or the leisure class of
language at the moment.

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She has lost a
child, that's all.

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And although it has
been almost a year,

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there is no consoling her now.

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Time has broken.

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This is not mine to claim.

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What can be written has been
written already on a Kleenex

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I gave her.

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Let the wind blow it away.

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