Into the Teeth of the Wind
Selected poem from Volume III, Issue 3
Relativity I
(From Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre’s early Daguerreotype,
Boulevard du Temple, Paris. c. 1838)
The long exposure
of Daguerre’s new process
created an image of a ghost-town Paris
The movement of maybe a hundred people
Carriages, socialites, quotidian businessmen
Too fast for the geologic time of the developing plate
razed in the chemical bath.
They are all gone; the wide newly
paved electric streets are all
that’s left
Except for the men here,
in the lower part of the frame
who stopped, in the afternoon,
to get his shoes shined