The Photograph

The photograph used to do so much,
it etched in light,
it touched corners of a time
and space we otherwise
could not touch.

But now--now what is the photograph?
A meme to make others laugh,
a passing advertisement
making the line on the marketing graph
go from low to high?

Why digitize the photograph?
Where is the light, which we
used to see slowly grace the mat, now?
It is underground, traveling
beneath the Atlantic, or in some warehouse.

Some dark desert warehouse
where are stored memories,
pettinesses, all the colored emptinesses,
kept away in a vault for some investigator
to exhume, laugh at, shake his head.

Whose fault is it, this runaway narcissism?
The dread of it is not that the schism
between public and private is blurred
or that everything is pictured, the dread
is in the colors themselves, our current prism.

It’s a prism inescapable now;
now that we have submitted to its bind
we are incapable of ridding ourselves
of its shallowness and its kind
of leveling inconsequentiality.