Craig Smith

The last two videos he watched

(finished with replay simulacra)

were enough for him.

The first was of a wasp trying

(desperately, without success)

to reattach its own

decapitated head, turning it

(frantically, every which way)

like a rubix cube

in order to find the position

(impossible, we know this)

that reconnects

the nervous system and

(with a jolt, with relief)

allows life to continue.

The second was of a recording

(transferred via deep space)

from the surface of a

comet, never before captured,

(reflect on the engineering)

wherein we observe

grainy ice storm parallax frames

(like a grey and white flipbook)

sequenced together

from a burst of small photographs

(onboard the Rosetta probe)

to generate motion.

The wasp video has a duration

(too long for his capacity)

of one minute, while

the comet video only lasts for

(always shown as a loop)

one second, and the

question that he has right now

(that he is done with film)

is what poets would do

with these visuals compared

(think pre-information age)

with the universal

nature of images that readers

(contained within analogies)

previously related to

because they knew what they saw

(and so saw what they knew)

in regular daily life.