Mark Sullivan
After a Photograph by Roy de Carava
It is a privilege of objects
to become invested with light, to shine past
their dull spectrum, as if struck
with small spotlights on a darkened stage.
And then they can recede again
into that country of shadows we all own
the passport to, our blank anonymity
staring back from reflections in plate
glass, from the compound dots forming crowds
in newspaper photographs. But what if they refuse?
What if just once they step forward
into those bright cones and then won't relinquish
their stunning celebrity? There could be
a music stand in an unpeopled room,
nothing held there but the score for brilliance;
there could be a small table top levitating
within a black pitching space, like a slab
quarried from the slopes of illumination.
Upon it, the remnants of a meal, stacked
white dishes, smeared glass, crumpled
napkin; on all of it a gleaming residue
as if it had served a divinity, some
disguised wanderer in Homer, quietly
feasting at a goatherd's hearth. And that
could be his coat, left behind and so full
of his presence that it seems
to stay upright by itself, without the backing
of an unseen chair. Meanwhile, the other side
of the table, the part dissolving into
a wellspring of darkness, seems to have been held
for one who never arrived. You can tell
by the way the two ketchup bottles (almost
sinking at the back of the picture)
beam their screw tops like lighthouses
that it would be easy to become lost here,
just within sight of this refuge.
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