Thomas McCarthy

These brown discolorations on a faded black- and-white photograph are not at all like a defect In anything remembered but, rather, a kind of “Crystallization” as Stendhal described it, in One of his more eccentric books about love. In truth, my childhood was cast down like a twig Into an abandoned salt mine near Salzburg From where it emerged, of this I’m certain, As something much richer than my own life, A jeweled branch of living history, now Retrieved by my mother from the well at Twig Bog Lane. I’ll never know who it was, and anyway Why would I want to know who it was, Who slid the black hard plastic button to On One late summer afternoon in nineteen fifty-seven, So that not only did some kind of shutter flick open In my head, but the full force of color saturation Hit my brain. The effect was high-speed Ektachrome And life as it is now, that studio of constant poems — It’s just that as my mother hauled the metallic Home Assistance milk gallon from the deep well In Twig Bog Lane, the light of deprivation reflected Back from her face and got lost in me, and I knew How biography is the steadying of only one kind Of lens, how memory offers different iterations; How, somewhere, a paper was being coated with Such chemicals that even deeper colors would form Over time. During that summer, a world away, The first International Color Salon was organized In Hong Kong and, while restrictions on dollar Imports meant that Ireland couldn’t reach a speed Of 100 ASA, faster colors kept rushing in. There Was no holding life back once it swarmed; biography Was ready for color, our brains were marked That year for realities more personal, realities brighter Than a boxed-in lens. Huge Blackwater river rats That knawed through the doors of our dry toilets in Twig Bog Lane were as ignorant of color as me; and Could not have known that their multi-layered bristles Would soon be seen in more subtle shades of brown.