Photograph

You aren't really here, at least,

not in the way you would be here

if I took a photograph of you right now. 

Years from now you'd look at the photograph

and remember what it was like to be here, 

but that's not what it's really like, 

just the way you would remember it. 

Memory doesn't the record the present, 

it redacts it. I look at the photograph,

try to get my fingernails under its edge

so I can unpick it from the present,

peel it away, see what things were really like

without the intercession of memory, 

but of course I fail, and only see

what I want to see. 

We build our logic on such fallacies. 

The salience of similarities 

forms the basis of valid analogies, 

coincidences and cross-purposes

that retain a temporary truth 

until their inevitable contradiction:

the redness of the apple is like

the redness of your lover's lips. 

The redness of the sands of Mars, 

lets us talk about about the redness 

of the star Betelgeuse to future generations 

who will never see it after the glow 

of its impending supernova fades.

We will be able to show them pictures

of course, but it won't be the same. 

They won't see what we saw.