Edith Lidia Clare
it is hard to remember we are not made up of image.
if we are made up of image we have bodies just a
couple times
a day. more times if you are me and love a mirrored surface in which you can turn
around and fix your newfound hair. still, it is hard for me to remember i am not:
fog, lichen, longan, rivulets down hills, palm frond, palm frond, palm frond, palm
frond, palm frond, the W shape of the sky between. the ocean dark at night, the
night itself, starless, not dark, lightened by haze, lilac and orange in the manner
of the cloth woven to catch two kinds of light my mother used to wear. pale froth
the ox tail pine makes out of air. all this and yet—we logically know—the eye is
lodged within the facial bones of what the body writes on other things. when you
are at the water’s edge in humid sunset, clambering over rocks, and slip on a slick
patch, it’s not the sky that falls. when, later, injured, you return to visit your first
bedroom after many years, you find an envelope of negatives you took when you
were young: a minibus, a pinstriped pinafore, hibiscus buds, a shape that could
have been somebody’s face, and blurring over it, a cloud, your thumb.