Daguerreotypical

This is a really difficult way to write.  I don’t think I’ll be attempting it again anytime soon.

Wristwatch unwound my loose lips freeze
Like photons in a flashbulb memory.
A quantum mechanic daguerreotype dream
Slipshod rides darkroom moonbeams,
January and her fronded silver canopy–
Her ceaseless and joyful shimmering makes me
Milkweed bleed, smiling white and healthy green,
Streets lined with nude dancers posing as trees;
Their icy lissome limbs seem incomplete,
But I make-believe they teem with starry leaves.

She is a keystone stonewall, a wallflower flowerbed.
She draws starcharts, she paints the portraits
Of famous people who never lived
On the ledgers of the mumbling dead.

And I haven’t learned any of it yet.
I don’t know anything yet.

She is a bedframe framework, a workday daydream.
She yawns warcries, she sighs the wraithlike threnody
Of life whittled at by bitter laughs and
Loneliness in the register of unwritten things.

A moving picture or a single frame time machine.
Our aperture souls skitter-hop like fleas,
Eyelids snap counterpoint to the shutter speed;
The lens scours the snow shower and gleans
More than the gleam above or the shine beneath,
But a murky ferrotype of our consciousness streams,
Our canals we control and fill to our needs;
Our locks open, we rise like ripened cream:
Our hands search the violet vespertine
And spell blessings in its bursting seams.

 
A daguerreotype taken of Edgar Allan Poe shortly before his death.  What a distinctive looking man…