The Company of Flowers
In those light-drenched shots I used to take
Of roses flouncing in the proper sun,
Picture-perfect summer summarized and done,
As framed as my unsure eye could fake,
In those proscriptive fields of view
Lay the fireworks of fields,
An unfocused subject which now yields
A different angle than my camera drew,
Strange shapes, shadows dying to be seen,
Shadowing the picture’s rims,
Where I caught the phantoms,
The visions that the photos mean.
December 25th, 1999
Explanation
Our lives sometimes turn out better than we planned. I never planned anything. I never thought about who or what I wanted to be. I was on autopilot, coasting numbly along. In retrospect I think I was traumatized by my mother’s early death, after which my father sent me away to boarding school. My grandfather knew the Platts, who had built or restored a few buildings there, and so I was let in a month after school started. I remember going around and shaking everyone’s hand. I became an honorary banker (a group of smokers who met down by the river, although I didn’t smoke). I think they were mostly “townies,” who came from the nearby town and were admitted to foster community relations. And there were a few rebels, poshboys from the school who didn’t care about the social cliques. Again in retrospect, the bankers were the genuine and the good, and the poshboys evolved over the years into cynical clubmen and bond traders, coasting on their families’ prior achievements.
This was originally called “Mold,” which I rewrote and retitled on November 19th and 20th in 2013.