The Proof (poem)

The Proof

News for you, today

Someone whose chance to tell was snatched away

Flags the wheel-spinner to lay a finger on

Picking you, passing vessel, because the germ of lost intelligence

Chain chain chains from its touch of polymer

A city in time-lapse, to grow on a flick of ash

Out of proteins and plastics

So that walking, waking, you breathe in this circulating

ember, which reassembling, asserts its story

Stories have a better telling in fiction

Telling details and decisive scenes

Framed by the videographer, the jerking camera, the long talks and tasks

Snipped, spliced, stabilized

Musically annotated, made urgent and narrative

Until suspense and foreknowledge RING

Until, hand-to-mouth, the viewer gasps

Until the reviewer clamps the phone, and taps

“drawn with the delicacy of fine filigree”

“emplaced with the exactitude of ancient mosaic”

“calligraphed with the fine-tipping of a radium girl’s clock-work”

“skewered as with a toothpick white cheddar on a Town House cracker”

Now, as the walker, you are certain

another has taken your place

Another walks you to an old address

The voice of your changeling condemns by your eyes

Not atrocity

But forgetfulness

The Caretaker

(2024, Stephanie Foster)