The foil on the pack catches my eye. An emptiness is captured there. The sky. The foil is reflecting the sky. Rhymes with it.
M. DeCapite
If he looks outside again,
perhaps the evening sky will blue a little more,
and the image half seen in the neighbor’s window
might bore into the lately-dulled warrens of his curiosity
and prowl among other burdensome urges not soon
(or already half-) written,
and find the same small, transcendent nudge
a sky and a pack of Camels once gave him.
He might see, as Morandi did,
that the trouble with getting any image right
is not a question of the wrong-aged soul
dithering between minutiae (such as light)
and intrigue (such as pussy)
but simply:
the little chasm of a late afternoon between the two boxes,
in the one and darkest shadow,
where who knows what truly sits on the table.
So he turns
(because you always must), and
before the image could disappear or, worse,disappoint,his eye led not just to a source—
………………..or some glimpsed body
of a source—
but the emulsion, too,
the fade,
just to see something take hold
then die.
[Originally published in the Breakwater Review.]