My mind is playing tricks on me.
Thin slices of memory slide out and blind me
with frozen moments from the past,
a stack of images,
shuffled,
held up one by one,
distracting me…
faces of people I knew years before,
catching my attention with a drop of milk
captured in free fall,
spreading itself out into a anemone crown.
I can feel my eye flex and snap
on things and places and people.
I take my change at the store,
the clerk’s sausage fingers dropping coins into my hand
and I feel my eye flex and snap,
flex and snap,
catching the coins as they fall
frozen, unblurred
the faces of dead men cast in perfect detail
against my reflecting eye.
The coins captured,
preserved,
tucked away.
The image waits its turn
to slide out from the deck and blind me
some ten years from now when I’m sitting in a bar,
smiling at a woman,
walking along the street,
following someone down an alley,
lighting a cigarette…
The falling coins will slide out then
and blind me for a moment.
I’ve heard of something
I don’t know if it’s true or not
but I’ve heard that the very last thing a person sees
before they die is reflected,
captured like an insect in amber,
recorded upon the dull surface
of their drying eye.
I’ve heard,
and maybe it’s just a story,
but I’ve heard that if you look into a corpse’s eye,
you’ll see a frozen reflection
of what they saw at the end.
But whenever I’ve had the chance to look,
all I ever see is my own face captured there.
And then another slides out,
blinding me.
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(From my theatre piece ‘ART/plays’ and inspired by the photographs of “Doc” Edgerton, posted here because a comment from Tim Kelty brought it back to mind.)