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RHINA P. ESPAILLAT People in Home Movies People in home movies are always turning or lurching too close, passing through and out of focus, big bleared faces all patches and shards of color; we want to tell them, “Stop! Hold still awhile against that background of shifting leaves and water.” But they keep moving over the edge, like doomed sailors, moving too fast for any lens, their backs turning as the film twitches over sky, gates, ground, anonymous pastures, a road splayed out, looped in again. By now we’ve lost them, their absence as disfiguring as patches. Memory, at our age, is bits and patches: Whose faces were those? Where were they, moving under those blurred clouds, laughing? Behind them, what sea was that, and when did all that turning foam unfold itself over the sand and out again? Names, features, fragments litter the ground we flicker across, as in a burial ground, graves of old friends standing out like patches. We know who they were, but time rubs out the writing, and the camera moving through past weathers is too hurried, turning our sudden decades too close to save them. We would need to reel backward to pursue them, make ourselves as we were, strip from the ground these crops coaxed from ourselves by the turning of each sun, back to bare soil and patches of early light, before God’s rain moving among small roots woke us and tricked us out. And would it be worth it, after all, out of a moment’s regret, to run toward them and buy them back at the price of ourselves, moving weightless out of ourselves into heart’s ground, the future discarded like old clothes full of patches, and the child in us naked, dancing and turning? People in home movies want out: they hide underground or behind new faces that cover them like patches; they age, they change, they keep moving past all returning. ART ...

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