Poem by Ruth Mountaingrove

CONVERSATIONS WITH YOUR PORTRAIT


 

I cannot bring back that dream
or your photographed face
or that ambient time
when the matrix was love
when the fuel of sexuality
fired stone into alchemy
the passions of the moment
caught on this thin film.

I can wish to repeat
but cannot
for the interstices have changed
and we are both older
and younger.

So your photograph is now the dream
and what mistakes we have made
in focus, in timing,
in our openness or closing
are as permanent as this piece of paper.

I cannot bring back that moment
I am not a time traveler
going back to the Pleistocene
or forward into oblivion.

I am here at this interface
of our separate lives.
And when I reach toward you
to recreate this ambiance
I am stopped by the wall of time,
the rock hard years,
the frozen moment will not thaw.
And I am trapped in amber memory.

So we begin again
as strangers
I the photographer
you the photograph
as though we had just met
as though we do not know
as though we have no memory
no record from the past

And is this possible?
Yes. Yes. Because now
we are strangers.
I do not know you
or you me.
Rocks and walls
stand between us
and what I know is hearsay,
is gossip, is what I see.

We are new to this moment
this moment I hold in the camera,
my eye to the photograph,
My eye to your eye.

§ § §

Ruth Mountaingrove, a gifted performance poet, was Queen of the Humboldt county Poetry Jam and Slam in 1996, after which she retired so that the honor could go to someone else.

She is the author of two poetry books: Rhythms of Spring and For Those Who Cannot Sleep. Her work appeared in two issues of the Manzanita Quarterly. Ruth has a weekly radio show on KHSU which features women - locally, nationally and internationally.

Her website is Ruth Mountaingrove

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