Last poem is the title poem.
This poem is not based on a photograph,
but it uses a photograph to talk about what, to be honest,
it didn't know how to talk about when it started.
And so the photo is helpful for it to come back to it.
But I think the photo self-identifies in the poem.
American Children.
This time when it comes, it comes all the way
like a fist to the throat, only harder.
Only this time, it comes from inside,
the way a plane explodes.
And what it takes to step from puzzle piece
to piece of wreckage still smoldering on the lake's calm
face.
I wouldn't know.
I wouldn't know because I'm not in the picture
of the cab and the cop and the rubbernecks
with their hands pressed together like cheap sandwiches
are slung from their pockets like birds.
Sometimes, they tsk and look away.
But the problem is they have to look at something,
and so they look at me.
They think they are looking through a window,
but because it has rained, the window is streaked,
and all they see, probably, and a little blurry,
is themselves, which is all they are really,
even in a photograph stalled at the intersection of America
in time where these things happen as we say when there's
nothing to be done.
And what I failed to notice is the chalk
outline on the pavement so faint already it looks like a wind.
If a wind can live in a photograph, might erase it.
Even to mention it is a violation to which
I am prepared to plead guilty.
On the day of judgment assigned me.
Until then, I am sentenced to witness
what Louis Faurer sentenced to the foreground
in black and white, untitled, in 1949:
a boy in a striped t-shirt.
He's so skinny he wears his arms like a straitjacket.
How cold he must be.
Each tooth, drilled into a lip like an Ice Age.
His eyes are BBs.
I don't know what to say.
I don't know what to say and that
is the problem of this poem, which
is not in fact about a photograph,
but about a woman outside my office weeping in the hall.
She is not engaged by photography or art
or the leisure class of language at the moment.
She has lost a child, that's all.
And although it has been almost a year,
there is no consoling her now.
Time has broken.
This is not mine to claim.
What can be written has been written already on a Kleenex
I gave her.
Let the wind blow it away.