Let us not adopt those spectacles that sadly enclose
a few people in a dark center,
keeping them fearful and immobile in silence and inertia.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I sit at the movies, convalescing, given
to a quiet physiotherapy,
to the exposure of a reflected glow.
The exchange is fervid,
I seek to be healed,
become the screen's screen, yield
the same vast presence of my body
to a lunar art. An absent bystander,
I am the patient of my passion.
Fixed in shared darkness
I observe the light's descent,
its catabasis.
I stop in a wood,
watch the film of snow
fall on the countryside, upon the creche
of this artificial night, curving
over the mute theater
in the current of the story.
Eyeing that lit window,
I see someone pass behind the pane
signal my way,
signalling to all
the sick and invalid here, posing
for the group photo.