We are blacker. We get to be as elusive as a woman

Sliding through the smoke of a man’s embrace. We get to be

Corner boys with bongos, a junction of tongues, an image

Of verbal bang-abouting, sparks of wet “say-what”

In the glad mouth. The world gets made, people get together

In its architecture, fringe and sequins slip from the edges

Of a hot body the angles the onlookers calculate.

We are on the side of Good God as well as the side of Goddamn.

To be a black man’s camera is to live covered in a sweat

That becomes all the water you need as long as you have to live.

*

The women will be here still when they are too old

To recognize themselves decked in matching hats

And a carriage that could make a suitor run out for flowers.

To hold time still, it may well be that God gave us photographs

And photographers. It’s not the same as painting or motion

Pictures: holding something you can press your lips to.

When an image is sucked into the camera, it almost sounds

Like sugar: sshhhka, sshhhka. It almost sounds like change

Falling into change, coins clinking in a restless pocket.

When the image is consumed, it almost sounds like the wetness

Of two bodies clicking into one another, like a soft pucker,

A clucking issues as the eye swallows the picture.

I need metaphor to describe it. I cannot hear the black man

Say, “Look into the camera.” I cannot hear the whispers

Or ruckus recorded or deconstructed in the scene,

But I know there are three kinds of looking in every picture:

The way the photographer looks, the way the subject looks,

And, Brothers and Sisters, the way it all looks to you.

*

Camera, I cannot say how I came to love you despite the way

You show me the things I will give up and the things to be

Taken from me. You make us people with no words

For destructible or death, you make us our mothers and fathers,

Our durable blood, our Kiss-My-Ass or Kiss-Me-Baby,

Our never-ending ends, the lovely girls who smile in a way

That makes anyone looking at them feel lovely. I will shuck

My socks and shoes for you, Camera, I’ll show my toes,

I’ll shuck my clothes and pose, I’ll shuck my skin until my rhythm

Is exposed. Motion blur. Shutter speed. A standing dance

With someone’s “again” strung out overhead, the sisters

With thunder in their grooves, the rise and footfall

Of what’s chased off, the skipped stone of what’s tossed out,

The song of a dress and dolled-up hairdo, of styled and stylish

Measure, of styles of beauty and styles of being and possibility.

*

I believe an archive of moments can become momentous.

I believe everyone is everyone and everything is everything,

But People, it’s okay if it all looks different to you.

Not even two eyes in the same head see the same things.