9. Did your slides include an image of a boy
Who sits before a book each night in silence,
His growing groping fingers searching for a word,
Flipping back and forth between the pages
So as to forget his father’s grimace and his mother’s darkened face?

10. Will you show your photograph of a tiny bedroom, shared
By father and son, and by the father’s corpse,
And by the son who tried his best to drive it from his mind?

11. Where is your picture of a young, young girl,
A girl too young to excavate the storehouses of time,
Or even to explore the closest closets of her mind—
Where is your snapshot of that girl falling down,
Falling, faltering, tumbling to the earth,
On the road, mid-journey, to who she was,
Before reaching who she would never be?

12. Did you snap a picture of sleep’s soft talons
That sink into your hands as you sit dozing in your chair,
Arms folded, your head dipping forward as if in prayer,
The sweet deep sleep that summons you first by hand,
Sinking into your flesh until your hands grow numb
And right and left hands melt into the air?

13. Did you photograph the great gallery of dreams
That I hang beneath your eyelids as you sleep?
That great dark curtain that sleep unveils
On the sunken world of past and future—

14. Where are your slides of that gallery of unlived dreams?

15. You eat your meals from blue and white china bowls,
But I eat mine from the blue bowl of summer
And the white bowl of winter,
Each inverted in its turn;

16. You light candles and turn on lights
While I spin the earth and push down its setting sun.

17. You take your pictures of the ocean, of the ripples of its surface,
But have you photographed the fullness thereof—
The centuries of secrets buried at the bottom of the sea?
For there are secrets there, deep secrets—
The past of the world entire, each moment perfectly preserved,
My vast underwater storehouse for every refugee of time.

18. I dare you, William Landsmann, to collect
A gallery of images like mine.
The oceans’ roar, and the fullness thereof—

19. These are my images, my universe, my eternity
That I have planted here upon the dry land in your midst.

20. I created you in my image.
I am not created in yours!”

21. And God retreated into the whirlwind.

XI.

1. And William Landsmann rose from his mourning, and left for his next journey, and his wife traveled with him. 2. And he traveled to the land of California, where he went nowhere but to the house of his son, and his son’s wife, and his two grandsons, 3. and his camera he brought not.