Black
Market
In the burned-out open-air square
there are no stalls animals cars or banners
only thousands of men some still in uniform some in partial uniforms
some in topcoats and fedoras some in Chinese coats looking
for something that can’t be found
the disaster evident in the piles of valuables spread on blankets
the man-clusters drift slowly
into new clusters
everyone is looking down
the catastrophe has already
happened this is the post-apocalypse all the odd jumble
of the past the detritus of former lives is struggling
to be reborn in the buying and selling
from far off a man squats on his haunches
inspecting a book & elsewhere
a tall man in black is refusing a sale
further back a white-hot light is boiling overhead
everyone is becoming less and less
they are fading
not even becoming a negative of themselves
and under that light
the buildings are dissolving
the unnatural musical light is breaking
in waves
over a future which is unaware
Writing
History
If everything becomes everything else
if every event touches every other event
creates it reverberates through and beyond it
then nothing is inconsequential and history
is both what we are and what we are becoming
a continuous making and unmaking a story of unspeakable
intimacy and unspeakable loss here is a photograph
of winter and dusk and train tracks
and a grimy factory woman who is trying to make her way home
someone who has passed out of one history
into another where the blanks are unfillable
we know so little but on that
we base everything
& the photographer who is about to take her photograph
he does not know her
does not know her reasons his own this man who became
the photograph I now hold in my hand how
the blanks & spaces fill the years
how much the body the tired body
the photographed body the figurative body
depends upon them
the spaces that loom larger longer wider
what was it you saw when you glanced up at him
that man who lived in a world which still thought
the world was all in the things you could see
Double
Exposure
In the aftermath nothing is impossible
nothing unthinkable
when the imagination redefines the borders
the countries cannot be found on maps
and people live between what they were
and what they imagine themselves to be
or between what they are
and what they are imagined to be
the high-school student wearing a Japanese army cap
and a cast-off white technician’s coat
is busy rummaging through the Signal Corp’s trash-filled oil drums
when he turns to find himself remade
in a book in which he will always be a scavenger
here his eyes can never smolder and they don’t
as they flicker over the face of the foreigner
who half-immortalizes him
he knows he is just in time to witness the art
by which he becomes the eater of trash
the user of refuse one of the lucky ones
and his only response is the leaden impassivity of his face
this accident he knows
but he is unaware of the accident of double exposure
whereby suddenly he is standing in a radiant field
that stretches for days
to reach some steeply-wooded mountains
ceremonially-banded by huge swaths of flowing white sheets
rivers of them flowing up and down and across the mountain slopes
a ritual by which the land is shrouded
fir that which cannot be atoned