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  • Figure in the Background at Lake Unmanifest
  • Darren Morris (bio)

There is always a figure just behind the figure in old photographs.    The gelatin gray mountains do not have this shadow,the charcoal trees do not, nor does the tar black lake.    But for figures, other figures creep away from them.Raincoats smear out painlessly across the earth and slip    into nothing. How easily they go. The natives seemed to know,and knew how to translate dark waters into emptiness,    a bottomless void in the world. The eye-hole of a skulland the boulders teamed up like teeth along the shore.    But there is detail in these other things. You can feelthe fissures in them thin as the blue-veined wrists of a girl.    You can smell the glacier hiding there, still pushing againsttheir ashen bodies with the same pure and measured urgency.    This photo is of the body that the figure left behind—the figure in the fore, which is only a matter of light now    flickering in my mind, once and again, as I remember lessand less, like the final still at the end of a reel, just resonance really,    with no significance and no clear meaning. Janus-facedfigure, I am all who holds you now, and I am an irresponsible sort.    There is another in the background, and it rises from you,or falls, and it is going away willingly toward obliteration.    You are holding up a fish. The fish is flash and vigor, an emberfrom the slack-jawed mouth of the supreme imperial, the water    blossoming inward from the shore. But you are not him anymoreand he is crawling and pouring into that nameless lake to drown. [End Page 70]

Darren Morris

Darren Morris's poems have appeared in journals including American Poetry Review, Southern Review, 32 Poems, Tongue: A Journal of Writing and Art, and Raritan. His fiction was awarded a grant from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and his short story "The Weight of the World" won the 2011 Just Desserts Prize from Passages North. He is at work on his first collections of poetry and short fiction.

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