Before it travels from premise to conclusion, "dis-
curs ion" runs to and fro—an action more panic than
reason. My mother lay with my father for an hour
before informing anyone of his death : what passed
between her and his body, after fifty-one years of
marriage, is exactly why each snapshot of him now
seems a spirit photograph. Spirit, like a taken likeness,
points to an experience essentially unbounded by
reference because it always already exists solely as
metamorphosis, scattered in aftermath the way, when
I entered the house where he died, my family seemed
to have been flung out from a single center as though
from a detonation, each caught in a posture of shock :
asleep, akimbo, still, each a grieving image, each his
absence. Perhaps what I’m looking for is not really
historical or theological, but directional. If I look again,
if I think I’ll find a horizon whose line I can follow,
I’ll find instead dispersal, a flurry of signs pointing
away from a single source. “Photographic history,”
the critic says, “always carries within itself the process
of its own erasure.” Mortal image, terminus and origin,
the only direction is after, a father too far away to see.