after Richard Avedon
All photographs are accurate.
None of them is the truth.
Yet you tell me you want the truth
        —to reach for a startled ghost
like moments printed briefly before disappearing.

From the phantom limb of memory
        where a severed piece is noticed     or not
I send my history out eclipsed. 
My blocked surface an impossible-to-tease-out jumble.
Scent:  ellipsis flowers in come-hither desert
        landscape dressed in plastic.

Red so difficult to photograph.
Blurrier than black and white.
Like the words as if  fixed in my heart
       —you grasp at the firmness of paper.
It dissolves back into earth     bits of carbon
       footprints of birds.