We’d made things once, things of substance:
Copiers, straight-sixes for Chevelles, Novas, Impalas,
And tons of film, of course, loaded into tiny Instamatics
Which accompanied us to everywhere and everything
(Unless they mystifyingly scampered away from pocket or purse,
In which case we drove, cursing and volleying blame to and fro,
Fifteen, twenty, maybe more miles to retrieve them
From the kitchen table or back of the toilet)
To document births and baptisms and weddings,
The in-betweens and hereafters,
(Renderings of children and dogs
Sitting under trees with blossoms of pink and red
The blooms implausibly bright, child and beast stolid yet smiling,
Or tableaus of tux-clad cousins and brothers,
Squinting blankly in the aftermath of a visual right-cross
Courtesy of the supernova-esque emanation
From the blue cube perched on the camera’s top)
So they would not be victims of the vagaries of memory.
All of that is gone--no, taken--from us now,
The means of production having embarked for Memphis or Mumbai,
Those things which sustained us now simply vestigial curiosities,
Like hand-cranked presses or ancient milking machines
We’d tittered at on long-ago school field trips.
The march of time and technology, to be fair,
But it has left us obsolescent as well,
Stranding us without context or clarity,
With access to neither advance or retreat
(The old photographs simply mock us now,
The red-eyed images fading to the soft tones
Of a rose at the end of its summer,
The name of the third man on the left,
Who’d worked on the line with us nearly three full decades,
Refusing to be conjured out of the thin air)
Leaving us diffuse and unordered
As the old and cracked negatives
Stuffed higgledy-piggledy between old snapshots
In an enveloped at the back of an old file drawer.