FPS

        -- for my father

At five o’clock the evening whistle,
and soon stars coalesced
up across the interstate
a mile from here where truckers freighted
oranges into Florida (…lit coals,
on their way to Newcastle). 

Post dot-and-dash, a bit before dot-com,
women and men poured out of the cavernous
buildings near this street, a century’s grime on the windows,
everything through the windows gray as the windows:
the air, the stilled machines, the smoking workers—ravenous
and oil-tinctured, heading, at last, home

to Huntley and Brinkley and supper. In the Lumières’ 1895 film,
women, men, boys, dogs, and horses flicker
out of the factory doors to be captured
inside the wide, black-holed aperture
of the newly minted movie camera set before them to depict
their living portraits on each frame.

At 16 frames per second
the reel bamboozles the delighted
eye, each moment zooming
past as slyly as Hume’s
colliding billiard balls—the present, divided
from itself and sent along its way segment, after segment, 

after segment. The workers seem drunk or maybe crippled
from years on the line. Only at 24 fps
will the brain smooth their lumbered gaits
to ours—as if you and I woke on the moon 1/6 our weight,
stunned and shamed by such sudden finesse,
unsought and granted. From the interstate, trucks and carpools

wind out miles ahead of their own receding decibels.
The sound reaches here in the house dimly
over the wavering, warping 
air. With no more sense than the boy sweeping carbon 
from inside the factory’s chimney,
I, nearly your age now, cannot fix any of your decimal

points or, if I’d stare up through the lens 
of the bricks with your long inquiring squint,
determine where all the ghost stars
have made off to, or parse
at what percent
such speed approaches present tense.

 
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