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"Photographic Memory"
The problem is not that people remember through photographs,
but that they remember only the photographs.
—Susan Sontag
I.
When the fire
was almost to our house,
the flames just a ridge
and a whim of the wind away,
after the sheriff's car
had rolled past blaring
over the too-loud loudspeaker
that we should prepare to flee,
it was then we had to make
our choices,
what we couldn't live without,
what was irreplaceable.
And after the wind had shifted
and our neighborhood was spared,
and we were left wringing out
the dinge of smoke
and the images of blackened
trees along the fire line
like dead sentries
at their posts, and the houses
had been hung with sheets
painted to thank the firefighters,
it was then we felt
secure enough
to unpack the car, still freighted
and pointing downhill.
And, later, in the parking lots
and grocery stores,
in the telephone conversations
repeated with each neighbor,
each worried inquiring
relative and friend, the question
was the same, seared
with vicarious urgency
beyond curiousity:
What did you take?
And always, among the pets and art,
legal papers and financial records,
cash, heirlooms, and jewelry,
the answer was: the photographs.
II.
After the second fireball had singed us all
and the world had turned into a negative,
after the images had been replayed, replayed,
and replayed until we could replay them
at unwilling will, and after the ash had elbowed
through the streets and the flurries of business
paper had drifted and the face of the devil
had been traced in the smoke and the leaping bodies
had embraced gravity one final time
and were not orderly in their fall like bowler-hatted
Magritte men and were not surreal but all too real,
and the gray tentacles had engulfed the buildings
and pulled until they collapsed, and after
the smoldering and the compressed eternity
of digging, dismantling, and disposal,
when hope had been sifted and sorted,
and there were not hands to go with fingers
wearing rings set with stones born and returned
to the heat and pressure, after the tattered flags
and the incessant nights of seeing and coughing,
vigils beside posters grieving on chain link fences,
the photographs from desks and wallets and walls
were found and restored, were survivors
in place of survivors.
III.
In the photograph on my desk, my daughter at nine years old
stands beside my dog, a crescent of empty beach in the background.
Both are looking out to sea, the dog's belly fur dripping
from a foray into the surf, tongue lapping up the briney water
that I never understood how he could drink. The sand they stand on
is wet from a just-receded wave and reflects the clouds the way
the salt flats west of Salt Lake City do and you feel
you are walking on the sky turned upside down
or on a glass negative, everything reversed except time.
IV.
The verb is to take a picture,
as if to own it, just as a camera
is feared to steal a shard of soul.
We cannot possess the past,
even in snapshot fragments.
We cannot possess anything, although
we can be possessed with possessing,
or, rather, attempting to possess.
Videos, prints, slides, rounds
of home movies on outmoded film
like a pantry full of cookie tins
from Christmases past, or family
albums stacked and neglected
as leather-bound ledgers on
rural assessor's shelves,
infinitesimal aperture of the present
hoarded against summer's fade.
Already the fireflies are dead in the jar.
V.
The world gone virtual.
The world gone digital.
The whole disposable world
seen through a viewfinder,
a transparency structured on sparks,
stop-action wingbeats
with one singled out.
And this is what I'll remember.
And this…
Come back to me, my minutes.
Come back to me, my sweet aging,
the sprocketed path I have traveled.
The photographs are the proof,
aren't they, kept safe from the fire,
the irrefutable truth of I was and I am.
The rest is just music in winter air—
not even there. It's not even there.
—Jim Natal
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