The Secret Life of a Photograph 1. Imagine a looking glass song, memorialized, mesmerizing. A photograph of a useless room, a door not closed or open. Startled words nestled, beautifully framed, kneeling, spangled with dust. 2. His breath, an escaped conversation, the cold makes into icy lace, a momentary mid-air decoration. An object like the photograph he once was. 3. Delphi: He remembers sitting on a hill, 6am, watching tour buses slither up the mountain road. Sacred and profane: an enjambed balance. What a thing is and exactly what’s missing. The Oracle, never photo- graphed, readies for seekers 4. Wishes on the moon, a new moon, every moon. Wishes to relive 12 minutes to the second. Remember: to turn slowly, to feel, not think. Two words. Hoping to make the sun rise, even though it already has. 5. The days’ held breath is released. Night exhales the moon, errant stars, and paintless darkness. Prayers, desire, exhausted wishes -- wordless, disembodied, caressed -- skulk against the sky, 6. If you will know the correct order of letters, you make a world, you make creation. An image and its presumed shadow. How he talks to himself: shrugs, sighs, muscle pauses, metastasized longing. An intimate conversation with absence. Not tactile, desired. Misunderstanding any means to explain. 7. The theory: make a line drawing of everywhere you’ve ever lived, and you’ll end up drawing your own face. Mouth and lips play at being muscles. 8. Homecoming: the sum of our mistakes: skin, nerves, blood - Nowhere better than anywhere. The house rests on its hips. 9. What he throws his disappeared life against is hidden: a mirror, freshly emptied, still wet from the afterimage. The image stitched on the back of a mirror. Mark Fleckenstein