The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Noctuary by C. Rees

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River of Lamentation

I grew up swarming for the love of men
who are now mostly old, or dead and naked in dirt.
I find them crawling over old photos, not ghosts,
but hives of caught light.

Faded at 24, Uncle Al in the clutch
of colorized film. He gazes at an open fire.
The river is brackish with summer.

The dead are a kind of grain.
A resident imperfection
                            in life’s material.
In the footage of Reactor 4 Shevchenko shot
three days after the meltdown, radiation opened
its eyes and mouths. It still speaks its life,
and eats the tape. In his photo, my uncle
bears a grain he never did in life.
His eyes distance, his body gone.

Static is the war of the ants,
like the living skull my brother lifted
from the blackberry thicket when we were young.
                                        Ants sutured on it false flesh.
When he threw it back, the thorns raked it naked.
                                        Grains, ants, my grandfather’s eyes,
                         the year before, caught in film, caught before
                         the basement. He died



                                                         in exhaust
                                                                     -ion.
At their funerals I looked for them in the bushes,
but nothing crawled back from dying,
                                                                                   only
                                                                 light.

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