Second-Hand Events
Dan Pettee
The ready reader’s gone, and won’t return –
waning image flaming like a wick in miniature.
Scarecrows flailing in a layered field of corn
scribble no prescription, hawk no simple cure.
The winner simply feeds upon itself, critiques
the ether, sees it wriggling like an errant spoor
beneath a solitary camera’s lens. So many takes,
so many images; losers watch them as they pass,
droll visions flashing like spidered streaks
of lightning in a slate-gray sky...or, rather, race
in narrow, proper place across a voided screen.
Life slows, then, to the pace of melting ice
in tumblers table-traced for morning, time sweeping clean
the mirrors that we face with fragile equanimity
each daybreak. Truth: duty’s what we can’t decline.
Try as we might, pray as we would, we
cannot freeze the image under curved glass,
cannot curb that random, reckless energy –
if just to shield it for some later, painless use.
Instead, we linger smugly, safe within the wheel
of dying light, a silently specious paradise.
And just like that the ready reader’s gone, a cheshired smile
the only photo-graphic image left behind.
We watch the moments fade, the faint exertions fail,
and think: a little less just might have been more kind...
Dan Pettee
The ready reader’s gone, and won’t return –
waning image flaming like a wick in miniature.
Scarecrows flailing in a layered field of corn
scribble no prescription, hawk no simple cure.
The winner simply feeds upon itself, critiques
the ether, sees it wriggling like an errant spoor
beneath a solitary camera’s lens. So many takes,
so many images; losers watch them as they pass,
droll visions flashing like spidered streaks
of lightning in a slate-gray sky...or, rather, race
in narrow, proper place across a voided screen.
Life slows, then, to the pace of melting ice
in tumblers table-traced for morning, time sweeping clean
the mirrors that we face with fragile equanimity
each daybreak. Truth: duty’s what we can’t decline.
Try as we might, pray as we would, we
cannot freeze the image under curved glass,
cannot curb that random, reckless energy –
if just to shield it for some later, painless use.
Instead, we linger smugly, safe within the wheel
of dying light, a silently specious paradise.
And just like that the ready reader’s gone, a cheshired smile
the only photo-graphic image left behind.
We watch the moments fade, the faint exertions fail,
and think: a little less just might have been more kind...