An old photo is a black hole to me,
drawing me in like gravity
and warping time so I find myself in its space.
That black and white snapshot of the Brooklyn Irish Civil War regiment
with drummer boy to colonel stiffly posing,
I see myself standing next to the corporal until I snap out of it,
for all of them are casualties of invincible time
while time is first taking aim at me.
And the 1890's photo of cute first-grade schoolgirls
dancing in ankle-length dresses around a Prospect Park maypole-
no, I could not be the smiling school principal watching them,
for they were all grandmothers by the time I was born.
The Civil War, the 1890's,
and the old photo of Pharaoh's sarcophagus taken in the Brooklyn Museum
are all postscripts infinitely longer than the lives they mark.
I bought that album of old Brooklyn.
But most of all is that nameless face looking out of the mansion window,
which decades later was torn down to build the apartment space I now live in,
that nameless colorless face I hold in my lap is staring up at me
as I gaze out my apartment window
in the same direction that face once so longingly beheld,
as space and time melds around us,
and for an instant one being scans far ahead.  

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Richard writes, "I have been published in many web and print journals. I have two personal web sites on which I've posted my poetry and photography."
Poems
Photography
E-mail: Bardofbyte at aol dot com  

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