Saturation
I.
Did you call the police—
I mean, an ambulance,
says Rakeyia Scott, recording
the cops who shot her husband.
He better live, she says.
She talks to them like any old American,
Oh, there’s trouble,
call the police,
but she revises. I mean.
~
I’m as white as Reykjavik in winter. I’m some person
in a county with its own cartoon sheriff —
not long ago four officers in four cars
came to reassure my youngest son,
home alone, the sound he’d heard was only wind.
II.
Rakeyia’s sheriff said that to release
the squad car dash cam footage
would exacerbate distrust.
How horrific is the video
if withholding isn’t worse
than what it shows?
My sheriff doubled down
on how the president is Kenyan.
Her sheriff goes by Chief.
Mine is famous for Tent City,
convicts in pink underwear, car-wash raids.
A posse of old guys with guns.
We laugh or cringe, we wring our hands, we vote.
“We.”
Some of us tremble,
or die in custody, that too. We all know it.
III.
Rakeyia knew in her bones
this solution:
call-the-police,
also she knew:
keep filming.
IV.
In photography, color saturation
is the intensity of a color
expressed as the degree
to which it differs from white.
Saturation bombing destroys targets
beyond “necessity.”
Saturation coverage distributes
one story everywhere.
We all trust our instincts
as if we were not more sponge
than mind.
~
Henri Cartier-Bresson says
when making photographs he replies
to the geometry awakened
by what’s offered.
Ted Cruz flexes his menace by asking
if sand
can glow in the dark.
The news tells us one thing ad nauseam
until the next erases it.
Resist, Rise up
A man lies dead beside his minivan.
Get woke Resist Rise up
People love sleep, and acquiescence. They complain
about the boot heel but laugh
when it’s on someone else’s neck —
Each call Get woke at risk Resist
of being swallowed Rise up
by some other open mouth, some other
proof straining in its frame. You have your viewfinder:
you see it, don’t you? Crop in,
prove you have an eye.
* * * * * * * *
“Near-Eternal Material”
accrues on the beach.
The paper says in staggering amounts
and shows a photo of Indonesian coast
not made of sand but washed-in plastics,
so many colors—a pretty photo, for a second.
I never had (nor wished to have) a diamond
but I had a ring. Naked finger now.
“Near-eternal material”: it’s like the chorus
of my life: what to object to, what to strive for.
One feels nourished in the ocean, floating. Or
by my mother’s house that’s true:
her nearest beach seems clean,
endlessly clean, not full of syringes,
not full of indissoluble soda or bleach bottles,
just gleaming sand, gleaming beige and blue . . .
You’ll see the occasional tampon applicator
or bubble wand or six-pack yoke
but mostly the water’s edge seems compellingly okay.
Love was meant to temper us into near-eternal material.
This photo shows a mile of trash.
How to understand eternal
in a world both beautiful and wrecked —
(depending on where you stand,
depending on how you look).
A nearness we couldn’t endure;
a material — not trash, not everything’s
a symbol or synecdoche, even when
the chorus makes you want to sing along.
It’s a gamble, seeing likeness everywhere,
looking for what sticks.
Inertia, or harm, or by-the-grace-of-god
good luck. The beaches need some stewardship;
the oceans, the landfills, need attention.
Whereas the smaller we,our effortful
attentions: let’s let them travel elsewhere.
Let’s look hard at something else.