View in Frames
Saint Anthony Main, 26 May 2006
Despite earnest desires of the hospitality folks competing to
snare the Wound Ostomy and Continence Nurse’s Society
the Minneapolis skyline exists as a drawing in sunset, drawn
from memory, rendered as the seeing-double-dreams of
pock-faced indigenous drunks mummified in bubble wrap
Scenes shot across a dammed river called Father of Waters
from a 19th century carte de viste sold to speculators back east
spuming promise below the engineered abutments of the damned
through what were once the unrestrained rapids of a pious saint
well-laid cobblestones distinguish Main Street from a blind alley
A view in frames girds the A-Mill from toppling into backwaters
atop a retro-fitted multiplex that plays continuous-loop films
about lives in decline and characters assuaged only by delusion
How many frames per second can a human eye see is not the
same as how many frames per second will make motion fluid
And how many frames per second make a movie stop flickering?
Suspended in a corner of a fixed pane is the wingless thorax of
a beheaded bee robbed of all but its translucent abdomen, its
unaccounted eyes vibrate to the jubilant voices in the café below
decamped in a silken matrix secreted from sightless spiders