A narrow path snaking along the cliff’s edge,
that cold garden with its clipped hedges
and heavy flowers, even the cottage in the forest
-our car by the gate, you somewhere inside-
don’t look enough like the places
where we were, although these pictures
are the proof we turn to
and show our friends. This is a good one,
I say—clear blue light and the mist dividing
hillside from hillside, so the eye
moves slowly upward to that castle
or church, at the center. And this
is the village where we lived for a week.
This is the house by the sea.
Then another duplicate cliff and sweep
of water, black flecks of birds like flaws
in an inch of sky, and the wind bending things down.
It became a sweet joke: all those ancient rocks
and the sea crashing against them.
Sometimes you are standing on the pathway,
sometimes there is only the landscape we came for,
my eye squinting into the viewfinder,
then the definite snap of the shutter.
I kept imagining how it all
would appear later, and what I’d find
myself remembering—the pressure each day
of merely looking, the desire to have felt
more than I would feel?
Or perhaps that was later, and as we walked
on a little further that afternoon
we were talking about the weather, or where
to buy groceries for the weekend, a newspaper,
a map, the ordinary details, the brief
consistent present, which is always lost.
I held up the camera.
The real wind pulled at my arms.
Waves were sweeping across the channel.
Leave a Reply