The feeling of a dream---a Photo of Victoria Rathbun

In the photo a poet looks out from another world. The modern America of the last century races behind her. I see her as if in an Antonioni still. Where do we go? I am reminded of Roberto Bolano’s waifs, racing around Mexico City circa the seventies. Impossible to hold things still. These forms of modernity resist stable morphology. How contemporary she appears in the photo. We leave the plastic form of our bodies. I pretend I live in another era looking back to our own. Postmodern fragmentation has been footnoted as a social weakness in the history of a dead race and its environs. The problem of who we are remains. The firing of the synapses in the brain; the eyes’ perception of light; the perspective that informs how we feel about invisible phenomena. Imagine all these things. Laughing our way into momentary, postmodern cultural orgasm. The buildings in the background provide the subject with a sense of place. And that geographic surface vanishes with the subject. She wanders into the drag of time. The body, too quickly discarded, is possessed of inert patterns. Along with these thoughts tonight I recall recent sightings: purple finch; cicada shell; purple martin houses; grapevines in chinaberry branches. And notice the disappearance of these outlines.