Dreams in Memories of Youth/The Grammar of Possibility
Stephanie's titles for each image appear below each photograph. The poems carry their own titles, immediately above the text.
INFINITIVE
To reflect
Implies
Possession
To mirror
Plagiarizes
But poorly
To find
Or rather let herself become
a Person, Place or Thing
Twenty Questions
And then some
Can I Be All Four?
PRESENT PROGRESSIVE
Reverberating
A lasting effect
Is it shine or shadow
Enabling this memory
capturing
The echo I keep losing track of
Tracing
My traces
Continuous progress
Alighting
Like?
SPLIT INFINITIVE
​
To simply confound the air
that beckons flight
freedom and escape
For the water
To be half caught
In a window pane
Neither out nor in
mocks multiplicity
The air, sky, trees and water
Merge temporarily
Displace disappointment
And disorientation
Until she remembers
She was the one
who made up the dream
Of reflection as a
Borderland to begin with
Over/Underwhelmed
FUTURE PERFECT
​
​
The future stares her down
Amasses losses
She knows she will have been betrayed
With all of his echoes inside her
like a second surrender
Staring at a Memory
INTERJECTION
​
Muffled and muzzled
Bark welcome into the wordless dream
And with uneasy gratitude
For the clamoring darkness
Curse arrogance with
Silence
Woof
CONDITIONAL
​
Untouched, unmoved
She could identify.
She would be bold
Hold the gaze
Frame the subject
Land the lens
Extend the metaphor
Who would be
Caught in the act?
Whose consent
On hands and knees
Would penetrate
If eyes and windows
Soul and lens
Let her take and be taken
Out of Body Experience
PREPOSITION
The whole picture:
Keep me in it
Save me for it
The whole time:
Take me with it
Free me from it
Remember:
It’s a choice
To be the whole story
Bound
THIRD PERSON (OMNISCIENT)
Remind me
How
She saw so much
All at once
How
She knew
What she knew
When once upon a time
Knowing made sense
Knowing
TRANSITIVE/INTRANSITIVE
Change takes an object
Time steals space.
Remember when they saw
Every step you took?
Make me once again
Your direct object
Before time tramples me whole.
Moving from Seen to Unseen
PASSIVE VOICE
Muted
By hours, days, years
Filtered
Screened
Unseen
Things were done
Life was lived
Memories were made
Then blurred
Suspended
A self made auxiliary
And was mourned
Frozen
INDEPENDENT CLAUSE
Alchemy is at work, gilding
The intangible.
Makes you want to touch it
Drawing youth and beauty,
Those heavy-earth magnets,
Into the Midas-moment
Glowing in even the
Shallowest shiny surfaces.
Stoop and swim into
All that lush vision.
But the voyeur knows:
To get a good look
Takes practice.
Chauné
DANGLING MODIFIER
Considering its intended use
On reflection she made
Misinterpretation the point.
Catching sight of beauty
It always takes
Back its gifts
The finest thief
Stealing from a storehouse
It stocked itself.
Out of the Corner of My Eye
SUBJUNCTIVE
Imagine needs cancelled needs.
If I were under any illusions
My hands might shiver out
This vanishing
And play with possibility
To stay interested.
Like a negative held up to the sun
Stripped and steeped all at once
Bequeathing questions not answers Yielding a lively sensation of ignorance Bleached and reborn
Where time can cut no tracks
The lull gifts its anonymity
And identification sneaks outside the lines
Phoenix Number One
INTERROGATIVE
If I can feel you watching
Is it your gaze that’s tactile
Or my mind that’s wandering?
I’m touched
But the feeling
Isn’t mutual
Or is it?
Are You Watching Me?
RELATIVE PRONOUNS
The night is darkly bright
Only for the young
Whose mothers
Shadow their shadows
Cast day into their daughters’ dreams
Calibrating the distance between
Those women in training
Whose confident bravado
Radiates incandescent
Youth
IMPERATIVE
Be still
Bestill
Be still
Stop, suspend, make no movement, no change, An imperative to calm
Go on, keep on, continue, don’t stop Distill
Blur the boundaries to
Tell myself, quell myself
Be myself
By myself
For myself
Bestill myself
Bestill my heart
Bestill my memory
Bestill me
Be still?
Hope Extends/Beyond the Glass
PRESENT TENSE
Ruin teaches
Everything she needs to know.
Stories walk with you
Blur the landscape
But sear the self,
Sharp amidst the field.
Grammar has no final tense.
Julia Fierce
IMPERFECT
​
Analogies used to work
In her favor,
Same, Same but different.
But lately living was
More effort than condition
Languor less a possession
Than a residue,
And endlessness
All that was left
Etched like faith:
Overexposed
And
Reverent.
Morning Afterglow
CONJUNCTION
And it’s almost allegory :
The camera as conduit ferrying
Souls through a few slits in the gossamer
An aperture that lets
Susanna come spy on the elders
Lures youth and beauty back
So close their scent fogs the frame
And we make love to the metaphor
Present and past entwine
Sigh sonnets as vows
And marry at the membrane
Perpetuity and transience
Not only transgress the barriers
Of time, space and memory
But shudder in a quickening
As thrilling as if
Exposure were perpetual
Invitation.
