Thomas Vogt, Keep Out, 2024 (Artist Instagram, Bluesky)
Film photograph
Olympus Pen EED; Lomography Potsdam Kino B/W Film
Courtesy of the artist
In his story, a boyish conqueror from New Jersey
helps a clam digger’s black-haired daughter
comb the Osaka surf. In yours,
it’s not 1946, though for a moment
you see what your grandfather sees
when he no longer bores you with stillness,
hunched in a wheelchair like hell’s
bronze thinker. It’s not 1980 either
and when you think of her you merely remember
someone else's memory, a short film,
the holes spliced out, though not the drive
along the coast to ground zero.
She’s long gone yet stubborn as dust
in a projector's shaft of light,
and what was that plume
but dust’s dark tresses unpinned, oblivion
shaken loose about the pretty forehead
of the earth? You picture the angel
inscribing Dante's with a sword
at the other gate, the one which leads away
from fire. Love will always change the world
unmiraculously like someone on a beach
with rolled-up pants before time
made him a statue, a shell of a man
fighting to shatter his own substance, a fact
you refute by walking around
their lives in that mindless way
all water is the sea.