Capture
She is sitting in a white bathroom,
in a hoiked-up gown, taking a pee.
The gown is a Parisian, oyster silk.
Her hair is dressed in two shiny flapper bangs,
a dark bow of lipstick drawn into a knowing smile.
The hand written caption; Bibi on our honeymoon 1919, Chamonix.
In this doorway, Lartigue stood, and steadied himself,
drunk on champagne - a moment of intimacy
understood.
Yet the photograph knows it is more than a moment of capture,
it holds all those moments before and after, that in some feral way
crouch like creatures on the edges of our vision,
telling of a man she flirted with in the hotel ballroom,
smelling of civet perfume, showing us the end of a marriage
already shadowed, as her husband stands naked in the doorway,
and she is laughing too much to protest,
and he is running back to the bedroom, for the camera,
his true bride.
Only then does it come alive, sensing each time,
touched by our look, a deceptive layer of calm cladding the deep
is pierced, as one war flickers into the next.
Such power still provokes our senseless, foolish selves,
to be photographed, with abandoned pleasure-stricken faces
drinking up the moment, as if the camera smears us
with the magic ointment of immortality, caressed and captured,
our lives slip by in fullness
and emptiness.
Page(s) 52
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