"Black Narcissus": A Poem by Amy Glynn
"The past / is perfect because it’s not moving."
Black Narcissus
You took all that I had except the last word (a depleted currency once all’s been said ad nauseam). All those late-night calls. Those promises. Those moments from the past we’d keep replaying, like a film you’ve seen until you know the mise en scène by heart and even though you know it falls apart you mouth the lines from that last, tragic scene or, as if it might change something, start singing under your breath, if you fall I will catch you I’ll be waiting… It’s never different, handsome. We are glue-trapped to the past, and every stinging dialogue demonstrates that. Well, I say dialogue. Really, though, this isn’t that. It’s scripted repetition. And I thought I could edit it. I’m an idiot. Back in the day acids and silver chloride flipped the script. Everything its own opposite. We had negatives we could replicate; we hid them in tiny envelopes, for later. Dipped in stop bath, they’d reverse themselves and grow to any size you needed. In them, we still live, forever warm and still to be enjoyed; embracing on a patio with glowing open smiles, eyes like a cat’s in porchlight, skins reversed (yours blanched, mine dark). Acids and silver chloride with their stark interpretation of the basic facts fixing the moon in place, a stygian sickle; replacing night with noon. It’s true we sometimes hide our depths—certainly you do, even from yourself. Sing it again: If you’re lost and you look then you will find me, and I should live in salt for leaving you behind and tell me you are not at all inclined to think we’re playing out a myth here. By the time this is developed fully, will you see yourself reflected back from its chromatic depths? Attracted opposites forever yoked to one iconic still from the silent age? The spring that once was here was drained ages ago. But if you could drink from it, would you? When you knelt there, would you see the water dripping off the spear gripped in the stranger’s fist, and recognize your own hand holding it? Perhaps you’d know the dark curls, salted gray, the inked arms now fading to grayscale too, as yours; the eyes, impenetrably glassy as a black spinel—yours. Call it restlessness, or say it’s self-awareness welling up like sea- water from frigid depths. We’re talking smack either way. Nothing’s going to change. The past is perfect because it’s not moving. There we are, beside an ancient spring somewhere, each other’s photo-negative, at last feeling heard; at last accepting who we are; that self-love is enough, and necessary; that we are cruel without it. That the very reduction to a facile aide-mémoire is punishment. Whose sentence is this? All this tedious palaver, all the pain on earth distilled to one endless refrain? Please call me back. Please call me back. Please call
