POEM: Don Moss’s “Hawkeye” (for Joel P.)

1
Wishing the now of captures lingered
So one might shoot again,
But culling the big twelve,
Several were set aside for next-of-kin
2
The miss-framed better-forgotten
Refractions of light
In cahoots with chemistry
Of that grainy time
3
Of tempered view
Fawning chameleon memory
The white of a face
Planed in a burning blink,
4
Often most frightful,
Far outlasting the instant taken
And so unlike the sky’s eternal
Blue-backed studio,
5
Varied by passing clouds.
What was the forecast,
Chance of overtaking yesterday,
By the inbred tactic
6
Of tidy farmed lines,
Viewed through a hand-ground lens,
Of personal aperture,
Not always just so
7
Or paint-by-the-numbers,
But how the face, oh, that face,
Fashioned by the optics one knew:
A slightly dull yellow #2,
8
Down the back of a long special-offer
Envelope saved until the light
Was just so, the hand automatic?
Dream: who shall replace the 6×6 cm
9
That dropped
From its album,
Its mounting corners
Vacuumed up, the machine’s roar
10
Too grand to concede loss?
One must have the eye of a hawk
To even note such things–the mind broods
About for anything that burns bright
11
During household chores,
How saturation of sound
Fosters solitude
And a kind of knowing
12
By unknowing, as when the right word
Passes too quickly for the eye’s set shutter,
For a pencil to scratch out the what the how,
That flashed so real, so now.