The smile is not an academic smile.
It does not travel from a particular site.
The pain preceding it was not defined by
a sense of closure, a sense that you were
there, raising an attempt at conversation
to let it fall. I have borrowed this association
only briefly, before letting the pain go, letting
it find its capstone to be finally buried. I have
lifted and remaindered the expression of deceit
and am not at all comforted by it. Photographs
offer up these smiles, to be indexed, then let
slide. They are swathed in the imprint of an
unexpected abstract. It is given anyway, from
you to the viewer to the beach where they lie
seeming not so forlorn as the stretching of history.
Leave me with it and I might sum it perpetually
or I may let it go, to slip into an ocean that
remains as an idea, a formal gaping, and an
incision where the face becomes undecided,
to fall through its features, sucked up by
generality and knowledge of so much change.