People In Home Movies

People in home movies are always turning
or lurching too close, passing through and out
of focus, big bleared faces all patches
and shards of color; we want to tell them,
"Stop! Hold still a while against that background
of shifting leaves and water." But they keep moving

over the edge, like doomed sailors, moving
too fast for any lens, their backs turning
as the film twitches over sky, gates, ground,
anonymous pastures, a road splayed out,
looped in again. By now we've lost them,
their absence as disfiguring as patches.

Memory, at our age, is bits and patches:
Whose faces were those? Where were they, moving
under those blurred clouds, laughing? Behind them,
what sea was that, and when did all that turning
foam unfold itself over the sand and out
again? Names, features, fragments litter the ground

we flicker across, as in a burial ground,
graves of old friends standing out like patches.
We know who they were, but time rubs out
the writing, and the camera moving
through past weathers is too hurried, turning
our sudden decades too close to save them.

We would need to reel backward to pursue them,
make ourselves as we were, strip from the ground
these crops coaxed from ourselves by the turning
of each sun, back to bare soil and patches
of early light, before God's rain moving
among small roots woke us and tricked us out.

And would it be worth it, after all, out
of a moment's regret, to run toward them
and buy them back at the price of ourselves, moving
weightless out of ourselves into heart's ground,
the future discarded like old clothes full of patches
and the child in us naked, dancing and turning?

People in home movies want out: they hide underground
or behind new faces that cover them like patches;
they age, they change, they keep moving past all returning.

 

© Rhina P. Espaillat

Previously featured in Croton Review.