Lauren Wilcox’s poem “The Motion-Picture Principle” first appeared in our Summer 2004 issue. She has also been published in the Antioch Review and the Oxford American.
for Eadweard Muybridge
Your staggered lenses, trained on an empty track,recorded what straggled into viewand out again, a dust cloud and a leaning packof horses. Silver decomposed to black
inside your boxes. You followed light—you weren’t confused by motion—how an arccould splinter, how something droppedcould fall in small and helpless stages, break,
and rise again, reassembling in air.You watched your wife step from the bathand knew that this, too, was a brief scenerepeating, a strip of naked women
dealt like a deck of cards. In the muffled street,in winter, your plates darkened on a snowthat stuttered down again in springtime,dim and slow, on a sheet hung in the garden.
Gray and halting faces approachedand backed away; a woman withdrewthrough a shutting door.Time was a string of knots, a spiked wheel,
a seam that you could split and heal—As a boy, reclining on horsehairone morning on a train,you watched the countryside,
a single light-filled framein which lives flickered, drawn forwardlike a train along a track; you saw yourself,suspended in a fractured, endless motion,
going, never going back.
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