{"id":100964,"date":"2016-07-28T15:48:16","date_gmt":"2016-07-28T19:48:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=100964"},"modified":"2016-07-28T15:48:16","modified_gmt":"2016-07-28T19:48:16","slug":"the-moving-picture-principle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/28\/the-moving-picture-principle\/","title":{"rendered":"The Moving-Picture Principle"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"muybridgehorseinmotion\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Lauren Wilcox\u2019s poem \u201cThe Motion-Picture Principle\u201d first appeared in our Summer 2004 issue<\/a>. She has also been published in the <\/em>Antioch Review\u00a0and the\u00a0<\/em>Oxford American.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

for Eadweard Muybridge<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Your staggered lenses, trained on an empty track,
recorded what straggled into view
and out again, a dust cloud and a leaning pack
of horses. Silver decomposed to black<\/p>\n

inside your boxes. You followed light\u2014
you weren\u2019t confused by motion\u2014how an arc
could splinter, how something dropped
could fall in small and helpless stages, break,\u00a0<\/p>\n

and rise again, reassembling in air.
You watched your wife step from the bath
and knew that this, too, was a brief scene
repeating, a strip of naked women<\/p>\n

dealt like a deck of cards. In the muffled street,
in winter, your plates darkened on a snow
that stuttered down again in springtime,
dim and slow, on a sheet hung in the garden.<\/p>\n

Gray and halting faces approached
and backed away; a woman withdrew
through a shutting door.
Time was a string of knots, a spiked wheel,<\/p>\n

a seam that you could split and heal\u2014
As a boy, reclining on horsehair
one morning on a train,
you watched the countryside,<\/p>\n

a single light-filled frame
in which lives flickered, drawn forward
like a train along a track; you saw yourself,
suspended in a fractured, endless motion,<\/p>\n

going, never going back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lauren Wilcox\u2019s poem \u201cThe Motion-Picture Principle\u201d first appeared in our Summer 2004 issue. 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