Shutterbug

Youngstown. A phantom in situ. Transmogrified
as a metro collage of relics and murals proclaiming
a former life imitating New York or Rome
in the making. "This is the way we were!" The murals
proclaim, winking from scattered facets,
from random walls as plasma screens broadcasting
continuous replays of a Pompeiian life before
instant annihilation. A line forms to get on the
nickel bus, the street is crowded, a hackney rig
stands before a stately home. Youngstown.
Rome in the making. Once.
My telephoto lens finds the Roman columns
of the State Theater. It is the unspoken
penchant for Rome that one sees in the glaring
rogue's galleries here and there. The shutter
flutters in pleasant vibration grasping the ornamental
cornice traveling from the State Theater to the fresh
painted building next door bearing the chiseled date 1899,
a den of do-gooders. The lens strays back
to the State Theater with the urgency of a periscope
finding the recessed portico where Jupiter keeps
the sobs of steel workers reading pink slips when
the furnaces shut down suddenly as the eruption of Vesuvius.
The end. The lens seeks murals, auto focus frames
a crowded street, the cigar and hat stores, the fitful
Model T parade shutting out the vacuous silence
of Federal Street as traffic signals change tediously
from green to yellow to red then green for imaginary traffic.
The shutter flutters it's pleasant vibration, a photograph
of a photograph drawing another breath.




Poetry by Peter J. Kautsky
Read 726 times
Written on 2008-06-07 at 19:46

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