Love at First Sight
Sun bleeding through the upper story
Pinpoints just this arbitrary place;
Leaves the color of a laboratory
Leave the pattern of another face
Risen from a snapshot as a flush,
Spreading on the surface of the skin
And burned like fire into flesh
Is rinsed and edited by melanin
Into dripping films of mesh,
Filtered into fragments on the spot
And frozen in a sun striped dress
By the summer’s bone hot
Flash, the eye’s synthetic fiber
Spun like light off Kodachrome:
A reflection tacked up on the dryer
And run to pigment like a poem.
Explanation
Here is a good example of how fairly simple concepts can be confused in verse. Four metaphors mix uncontrollably here: sun flickering through the high trees; a photograph flickering through the viewer’s eye, the camera, and the developing solution; a lover falling in love with a girl in a sun-striped dress or even with love itself; and, finally, a poem, taking an arbitrary concept in the same way sun falls on an arbitrary spot of ground, and breaking it up by the rustling of the leaves into fragments, turning it into the reality of print or developed film by reflecting truth (in the case of film, an artificial truth).