if anyone ever reads this again, here's a poem i've started... and it feels rather large and overly ambitious. i'm not sure what to do about that.

WITHOUT CAMERAS (title, hmm...)

Stacks – 101
EXPER-IMENTS IN
PHOTO-GRAPHY,
a Zakia & Todd [classic].
#83 leaves “Photographs without
camera[s].” Spiritual.
You always need a light
source, photographic paper,
an object for shadows.
Zakia (or Todd) thinks, “You could [even]
make a game out of a series,”
but leave out the serious.

Savant Kim Peek told his father, Fran,
they “share the same shadow.”
Where these perceptive, creative
expressions begin: are they
in-sync or out with a brain’s broadened scope?
Not where memory kicks & social aptitude runs?
Experience of and engagement with
sensory synapses—plug it in, switch it on.
Like widening or narrowing of aperture
holes
[held]
for light.

Open it wide, perch camera on slow.
It’s peeking from sills across South State and Lake
Huron, transforming pedestrians as
spirits and traffic—invisible whirs on my frontlawn.

#89: since “swiftly-moving
objects will not be
recorded,” when tools of perception
isolate a static physical world, well,
dynamics disappear.
We’ve the droll hum of ghosts--none softer than loud,
none louder than soft.

Dates, names, places—history as such—
words read or heard
can be “learned,” factual, embedded in memory.
But social response & our sensing a light source?

Peek retains all he reads, it seems,
in 8-10 seconds per page (easy, light, handy).
Where the rest of us cameras
with our too-wide or our wizened scopes,
share impulsive shadows
with Christmas Past’s Ghost.