G is for Gutless

Walking to work on an overcast day means I can’t take any pictures. The apparatus I use is crude, a tiny aperture, and the odd angles of my photos are me trying to work around that limitation, to get enough light into the oculus to create a viable image. So instead I think about the things I pass every day that I have not yet been able to shoot with any level of success--a mauled set of blinds, a dissolving bicycle, a dead fire hydrant with open rusting sockets. They have not told me how to speak them, how to frame them, they don’t resolve, coalesce.

And I think about when there was a man, and he was a mauled set of blinds, a dissolving bicycle, a dead fire hydrant, and he was a gorgeous spreading white peony with a flick of red flame at the center and the orange popsicle that you break in two to share and the fleeting precious blue hour when light is soft and magic and you never want it to end.

When I watched him sleeping in the morning, he resolved, he coalesced, and I knew how to speak him. I kept a camera by the bed so I could crawl over him, make him into a deck of images, pick one, any one, and you will see how I have papered the inside of my ribs, the room where my heart lives. To affix him, to give him back to himself ordered, disordered, wonderfully arrayed as he was, as he arced through me.

I had so many opportunities to do this. But I never took the chance.