You Are Not an Image

and I cannot choose to remember you.
I remember the look on Nurse Diesel’s
face as she ate her fruit cup, a slight mustache
dusting her lip, in Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety,
but I cannot remember a single spoon
entering your mouth. I have near perfect
recall of the “Grotesque Old Woman” hanging
in the National Gallery, and the sleek coats
of Stubbs’ horses, with their high-strung eyes
rolling back in their heads against the walls
of the old Tate, but of your similar ocular dramas
I have no adequate picture. In moldering
snapshots you’re there, but you aren’t.
A level emotion provoked by an image,
hollow and shameful, like an orgasm
coaxed from a dispassionate body,
a cruel exploitation of instinct.
Antiseptic odorless visual memory, it
works with art and film, but becomes
mere tedious recall when applied to
the natural unfolding of things: which is,
via the photo album, a self-justifying
story shown with drama to eyes
from which politeness has driven the life.
Would that there were no photographs.
A documentary impulse driven by millennial
fears or spiritual unrest. Today’s maladies.
They cannot compete with the irreducible,
gentle eddy of wind, the familiar
sweetness which seems to recapture
several lost lifetimes, illusory maybe,
but possessed of the quality, most lovely,
of evanescence. A beautiful privacy
belonging to no one, not even the skin
it thoughtlessly taunts into shivers
of pleasure. Art stops change, and thus
we can see it. My own face is less clear
to me than the faces of a thousand starlets
immortalized upon the screen. What will I
see the next time I see it, mirror-reflected,
busy with hygienic chores? I will see
something, fear perhaps, or the denial
of change, but I will not see what others
see, nor will a picture make a difference.

Jennifer Moxley, “You Are Not an Image”, in Clampdown