There's a quality of legend about freaks.
Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you
and demands that you answer a riddle.
—Diane Arbus
When the flash goes off we go blind,Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you
and demands that you answer a riddle.
—Diane Arbus
given over to a place made possible
by blindness. Light overflows the eye
as if to clarify the dark we see with.
It's all a lie of course. We know that.
We flinch at the sting of the shutter,
snap our lids the instant of the shot.
With all the rude wonder of the literal
heart, they come to greet us: the abject posture
of the giant, the child with a toy
grenade, his face in a seizure of play,
each horror pulled away as it draws
a little closer, into the dead still
solitude of a moment in the past.
What is a photograph if not a window
over a broken clock. All is glass.
Shame and awe. That is what the artist
confesses, bound by this to the mother
of the nine foot man, her face too small
for the eyes inside it, fixed on the freak
that passed through her body to the world.
If this is horror, it is not enough
the echo of our heartbreak makes it so.
Nor can we all be monsters and remain
monstrous. What do we really know.
Once a girl—an orphan of the fur trade,
a father's absence, a mother's nervous break—
grew up to coax the body's camera open
like a stage. The giant in the legend,
if he seems disfigured, perhaps it's nothing
more than the room around him, the mean
confines of the conversation he is in.
Is he not made of distance, of talk
that fades into an effigy of seeing.
Who are we to imagine less, to close
the fist of the iris. Light is gigantic.
To look or not look, choose your self-reproach.
Which says, it was never the act of looking
that mattered Only the power that bears our shame.
