Lise Latreille, Ghost Car (Artist Website, Instagram)
Chromogenic print
Courtesy of the artist
Between standing guard and bearing witness,
your sleeplessness. Part of the work is waiting—
for the furnace, winded, to rest; for the garage
to yawn around the sedan borrowed by a child—
and part of the work is readiness, as if low-grade
grief could bamboozle tragedy, as if the one fate
that could not take your dear ones was the one
you let loom, a premonition in the dark. Mostly,
though, you know that you are keeping watch
only in the loosest sense. You did not interrupt
the drifter who rifled your truck and found it
wanting, the kids who overshot the crab apples
with rolls of toilet paper, who decked every
runged or limbed thing with white crepe
that rainbowed and collapsed. And you do not
chase the deer from the garden. You let them be.
You tell me that night is your shift, that it has
always been your shift, no other way to explain it,
and I want to say, I feel it too, all the loneliness
of childhood, all the loneliness of how late it is.