1.

Because of the slow revolving

some blue matter tucked inside the star

sometimes squeezes out–

this is the origin of photography

which Dr Reich discovered years

after as blue sparks visible

in the night even the day sky

when considered through long cardboard tubes

much longer than what keeps your paper towels

from crunchdom and unspooling spill

and painted black inside and then oh my

how many lights you see and these

make little pictures in your eye

which later you mistake for women lampposts

mailmen little dogs smug SUVs

tooling through your little neighborhood

o Christ how little we all are

compared to or faced with those blue glints

or flakes of real reality shoveled from up there

wait I have a snapshot in my hand

that really shows my hand.

2.

Mecause of tu —

the bling-blank mother lode

of rhinestones in

the pressure factory

spins genuine diamonds.

So much is true.

So much is true there is no room left

for my cushioning falsehoods,

the thighs of Swedish women,

the memory of Slavic memory

as wielded by the White Sea

(the Kola Peninsula) writer

John of Bobrow in another yazyk.

Or paltering polonies,

midrash of frenzied Indians–

even the Hopi are goyim–

and I detect the friend of a friend

shooing random cats out of a stray house.

3.

Everything belongs to me, no?

Everything but you

who are no thing, hence can’t

belong, canst barely be

in this blue Osmanli winter

churches in domes domes in snow

they leap across the voices of the children

singing womanwise in the sacred space

behind the iconostasis. Now you know.

You are just some voices in my head,

women imitating men. Men

imitating me. And all of it a trick

God plays on the world and never seems to tire of.

4.

Because we see brick better than stone

because a street glistening with rain

is already a compromise with theology

and the red lights (no-color in your images

just hot spots) on carriages

are really gleams of sunshine maybe

on the bright day your process required

and no one passed. Because we see

a street better than a road, a house

better than a hill, an actress up there

on the screen better than our mother.

5.

Keep thinking that means something,

doesn’t. Play of light on surface

sensitive to light. Play of dark

on what we try to remember.

Every photograph is a terrible aphasia.

6.

What could it speak if it were only a color

and nothing in our hands not even a stick

to point to the wall with Here Be Image

and it is only something moving that you make stop?

A picture is something moving you make stop.