Post-Processing
Poetry
After my husband died, I began looking for him in the photographs documenting our travels. But the documentation did not match either my memories or my longing. So I found myself remaking it. Was I falsifying or restoring?
There you are—image S052919. Leaden light, grim water. Iron dirt. You’re too small, too far to the left. Is this how it is,
the afterlife? This image is a throwaway. Something to delete. Except—I lost you once. I’ve lost too much to let it go as well.
I select the gray. I have to manufacture sky. I’m flipping through summers caught on screen. There was so much light, we took it
all for granted. I find a sky to steal. Contrast, dodge and burn, I will the faded peaks to solid form. That is the easy part.
There is no sunlight where you stand. I brush a path of yellow, 25 percent, right to your feet. Clone lupine at the gravel’s edge.
It’s been an hour and this isn’t done. I crop and crop the loch. I want you big. I can’t get close enough. Make you too large
and you just dissolve, you in your red fleece, turquoise buckle under the belly’s swell. I saturate like mad, to win you back.
But your eyes are hooded; you drown in a dream. Who am I if I am not in your eyes? No, this I will not cede to death.
I toggle you to 300 percent. Borrow a blade of grass, a chip of rock, alt click and click, alt click and click, until at last
you have hazel irises. Fragments inside, scraps of seeming light that might be me. In another hour you’re looking back.