Feb 10 2008
A battered blue box
in the back of a closet
full of black and white photographs,
scattered like playing cards;
no labels, no dates.
I see smiling faces.
And new moms
showing-off their babes.
And old men in baggy swim trunks,
all skinny arms and legs.
And young fathers
smoking, cracking jokes,
standing tall by white-wall Chevys
and 2-door Fords.
Everyone looks happy.
Everyone says “cheese”,
except the wise-cracking teens with slicked-back hair
who affect their usual indifference,
that awkward mix
of bravado and self-consciousness.
And everyone believes
in the posterity of snapshots,
the power of film.
They are thrilled the camera captured this moment,
when they were beautiful
or proud
or full of hope,
and dared to be immortal.
I have no idea who they were, or when;
except that now
even the babies have grown old.
I know it’s superstitious, like pins in Voodoo dolls,
but I leave the old photographs alone.
In a box in the back of the closet,
where never-ending smiles
keep lighting-up the dark.
2 comments:
My comment is exactly as I wrote it immediatley after reading Snapshot.
mmmmm Smiles in the dark - no one to see you happy
but then, does it matter if anyone knows
no, not at all, be happy, smile, laugh
whether anyone can see it
or be a part of it
For me, the image of those faces smiling-on in the dark is all about the transience of youth, as well as our ultimate insignificance -- despite the fact that we can't help living out our lives at the centre of the universe. I see those smiles at the end as filled with a kind of bitter-sweet angst, a melancholy, a sense of false hope -- smiling on to eternity, unseen and unacknowledged. I suppose you need to have my nihilistic temperament to get that, though! And how these snapshots, which in the moment of their creation consume us in our entirety -- the absolute focus of that instant of time -- are shortly and forever afterwards like yesterday's newspaper: forgotten, yellowing, irrelevant, unread. And yet we cling to them: as if this 2 dimensional image of chemicals and pigment could make us immortal! I guess this is my way of writing about death (which is what I always want to write about, but restrain myself!!!) without being so obvious, or even using the word!!
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