Peter Szilagyi: How the Ghosts Are Seen
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
The Provenance of the Photographic Grin
One tree tells another, Smile, camera shaking,
falling through indelicate leaves like light
always does. It’s easy: to drop, to break, to leave
uncensored young sprouting on the forest floor.
When we were young, we went collecting
cameras. If their fall was recent, flesh still firm
in its convictions, we could take them home,
jam and jar them, or eat them fresh,
though fresh film is morning and bitter, cutting like the knife
that cuts fresh film, that peels away the flimsy,
filmy peel, its canister coil and twist. This is how to taste
family photos and first days at the new job, everything
brief and astringent. If squirrels find them first
and they sit underground, or worms leave a pulpy
mess inside a sagging camera, our parents told us not to taste,
to leave these flavors to specialists inoculated against
incomprehensibility. These could be developed
only in the dark room of time, of glaciers and extinction.
Some prized the most the bletted film, dropped
after the first frost, immaculate, mushy, and revelatory.
The frost rebels against long warmth with the thin chill
of analysis, of dusting and pulling back
the sheets. This is how the ghosts are seen
as ghosts. One year, one camera, bletted, yielded
photos of the cherry trees, strange hybrids.
Above and to the left and almost disappearing,
their ornamental parents, scattered through the city,
blooming every April, and ships, and freight,
and waves, and waves. One camera yielded
photos of a newly planted chestnut, and lurking
behind it, the Bronx’s last suckering chestnut of the last century,
five years dead, and ships, and freight, and ghosts
now seen as ghosts in the Atlantic cold,
and waves. And power in the waves and on them.
Peter Szilagyi (they/he) is a recent graduate of Cornell University (on Goyogo̱hó:nǫ’ land), where they studied English Literature and Plant Sciences. They are the former Editor-in-Chief of the Ithaca-based magazines Marginalia and Rainy Day. Currently, they farm and make wine on Ute land. Their work has appeared in Doubly Mad, Eachother Journal, and The Lyric.
