Afterimage

By Phil Lane

Here is a photograph,
a composite of youth:
boys race down a flagstone path,
bicycles rush over macadam streets,
the world is black and white,
uncomplicated.

In paper-thin portraits,
in auburn tomes,
the dead live on,
their monochrome faces,
their frozen smiles
filed and dated
like evidence,
pressed under glass
like fossils.

Here is a photograph,
an abstract of youth
that paints the past distort,
lithographs the lines
worth saving,
turns bitter experience
into something
you can frame—

Phil Lane's poems have been lost in cyberspace for the past decade. A very, very precise google search can uncover many of them. Mr. Lane lives in New Jersey and teaches English for a private tutoring company.