from THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY (1993)

First takers, first makers.

The first sip of intelligence splits the diapered sky, already crackled with the losses that events are.

At the old treehouse one is clogged with sleep in any case. Dust garlands that sway like chains of mice. And up from under the palaver there is golden food.

So let it be clean at least.

The first person to be photographed was a man having his boots cleaned. There were others in the same street, but they moved and became invisible. How calm I am!

Baron de Meyer saw the horse and it too moved on. Nor was the lesson of satin lost on him.

It all came to seem a big joke, his cake.

Besides, who would care, a little later, later on?

Not the house dog. The twig of coal?

Not the letterhead, though it is preserved, shining where tulle cannot undress the board leg under the table. It is all a—how do you say? —A fancy.

How could I have had such a good idea?

But you know, the way they all say is a barrel.

Times two and too much. I have been coming and going a fair share of my life, and some of me is up there, photographed. Like a chair listening to a victrola record I experience too little and know too much for the good of others and their bathing suits.

Then too, as much escapes me as a tailor’s dummy in a photograph by Atget, taking in everything and nothing, which caused the rain to fall one day.

Another day it was fine, we were “bent” on pleasure. Sure enough, a skiff comes round a bend in the Thames, a glory in progress. And we haven’t even to see these men, small as pickerel in the darting black, for its hum to come to infest us too.

And buildings rise one behind the other.

That is the festivity in this sense, but it’s all like lace paper doilies, alludes . . . Meanwhile another man spoke to me about a pocket watch. I have it here in my pocket and can choose to let it go.

And when all is said and one this one is let go. Dominated by fools, he was desecrated for a time, then came of age in autumn, just as the flocks of purple storks were taking off for another climate. He ranted and was let go.

Recanted and was let off.

The slow burn is thus the face’s fixture, what it needs, and has to tell. Everyone understands that as a convention, born to pester yet never released, never owned up to. O but I could call you and you’d come over.

Never made a dime at this swamp and some liken it to haze, as distance is draped in the mind of the feeling man, who then gets his share of surmise and stumbles off to bed, a fool in time.

Francis Frith released the pyramids.

Nègre produced the ogival mysteries, Mapplethorpe the dissenting penis (O astigmatic, in whose lone eye a chain of flattened stereoscopic eateries atones for alternating dark and light bands whose subtle pressures never made it into history: a time of sad busyness climbing into sadness for the view, always the same).

But while all I need is breathiness, lesser demons thumb their noses at the moist parade even that notion insinuates: only a door, to be discovered sooner or later.

Meanwhile what about the decoctions of nature, you know, nature, that some were swigging already?

It was in fact the door to the great treasure house noted for its treasures. And all I heard was one goblin say, “Grace under pressure is the only reasonable account it can give of itself. But whence comes this pressure? You want breathiness, I’ll give you breathiness, but I still maintain a drop of evil colors causes and effects with an ambition wholly beyond ambition, and that the sorrow is buried there.

Tomorrow, though, we’ll leaf through the others, see what can be patched up, and what kind of sticking tape devolves to this vastness and would-be vastness.”

But it would have turned out differently anyway, besides which it actually happened.

Two were in the rain. The life ballooned up through them, light was as shoes to a frame of mind.

The wind didn’t know what to make of any of it and didn’t realize it was invisible, which would have helped if it stumbled into a garage, disturbing the ashes on a mechanic’s cigar. Then, what time, what tigers!

Any of us were giddy. And it was at this point, always, that the light failed, like bunting drooping against a building’s dirty facade.

Make that two epitaphs.