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