Self-Portrait as the Bootblack in Daguerre’s Boulevard du Temple by Robin Coste Lewis

Self-Portrait as the Bootblack in Daguerre’s Boulevard du Temple

(An erasure of Grant Allen’s Recalled to Life)

 

I don’t believe

I thought

 

or gave names

in any known language.

 

I spoke

of myself always

 

in the third person.

What led up to it,

 

I hadn’t the faintest idea. 

I only knew the Event

 

itself took place. Constant

discrepancies. To throw them

 

off, I laughed,

talked—all games

 

and amusements—to escape

from the burden of my own

 

internal history. 

But I was there

 

trying for once

to see you,

 

longed so

to see you.

 

I might meet you

in the street:

 

a bicycle leaning

up against the wall

 

by the window. Rendered

laws of my country

 

played before my face. 

Historical, two-souled,

 

forgotten, unknown

freaks of memory.

 

The matter of debts,

the violent death

 

of a near relation,

and all landing

 

at the faintest conception.

Dark. Blue. And then.

 

All I can remember

is when I saw you. 

 

It was you

or anyone else. 

 

The shot

seemed to end

 

all. It belongs

to the New World:

 

the Present

all entangled, unable

 

to move. Everything

turned round

 

and looked

at you.