Alchemical Breath

a photograph of a room you’ve never seen before,though you may feel as if you have . . .

All the have living have left,and all their last breaths are being held by an alchemy that lingers in an old man’s fingertips, his nails stained brown.

The hands have fallen off the neutered clock that sits, still, upon that strange cement mantelpiece.The cold steel spring of this clock’s cousin, the grandfather clock standing complacent — reflected in the big mirror above the mantle,making of the photograph itself a looking glass and conjuring a room behind us,tempting us to turn to see the clock as if directly —has not been wound since well before the days of final sounds, of sighs and yawns. The coil of the clock’s spring is un-tensioned and inert, yet somehow still alert. Two clocks, no time. Still, all the time that is,is in this world. From the hearth, a river of dead ashes flows.A handsome battered wooden chair is pulled up near.Its leather cushion, all springiness long gone, bears the imprint of a woman whose long absence is marked by this doubly permanent impression,left when she roused herself and rose for bed. She hated to leave the warmth of that fire. The bright and all-embalming light that flows, still,through parti-panelled windows in the walls now floods this paper reliquary and reveals fresh rose petals, redin the gray ash of the grate. They will be fresh and red forever, just as the ashes will be forever gray, until the photograph itself begins to fade. It has begun already, invisibly, as fading always does. Might we still enter?

photograph by Parrish Dobson

- Larry Sheinfeld