The image keeps returning.

I go back to my manuscript, with a friend's comments in mind, and I begin reworking the central long poem, the one I'm most worried about. It's not right yet, but it is surely close. And when I begin to re-arrange the pieces, I see what's missing, how to fill in the gaps, and a version of the image arrives: gathering then scattering, scattering then gathering.

I don't know exactly what this means—or, I should say, I don't know everything this means.

But I know this interest underlies my work for the last several years, maybe the last decade or so, and now it's beginning to assert itself more clearly in the different media and the different efforts.

In the photographs I'm taking again, in the photographs I took steadily for two years, the strip of film is the gathering mechanism, is the scroll that holds these scenes, this detritus, these forgotten handkerchiefs that together suggest a broader presence or event or effect.

Who is leaving these things everywhere?

What is the shape of the space or the absence between them?

In the poems, too, whether the elegies of A Murmuration of Starlings or the more recent poems, in this manuscript I'm calling Persons Unknown, or the prose poems I'm writing more and more of, the effort is the same: to find the far-flung indicators of a missing center.

Perhaps it would be better to say to create a center around which everything revolves, or to ignore a center that doesn't exist by working the periphery which is the center.
This gets us to the title I'm currently writing under here, "ambient witness." The term is not precise enough yet, but I'm trying to describe something that doesn't have a singular precision.

What I mean by this phrase is this:

"witness" is not a person, but an act or office, performed multiply or partially by persons, by environment, by world: everything is recording everything: the city is a document: it surrounds us: we live in the witness of the world and are part of it, contribute to it:

much of the time, we live outside of the moment in which everything will be looking at the same thing, the historic moment, in which these partial witnesses would be seen as one thing, one consciousness: but in those moments, those historic moments, we find ourselves aligned with everything else, looking at the same thing:

there is no center: or: the periphery is always the center of itself, though at a moment of intense consciousness or concentration, the center seems like a center, rather than the periphery:

This is a version of Ammons's one:many problem, and I'm paraphrasing passages from Sphere because it is a central (and peripheral) text.

I am looking for the moments of attention, but also searching for the corresponding moments of distribution, relaxation, when the center disappears, a different kind of attention, an ambience, a relaxation, off-center:

everywhere:

*

and the witness is fleeting: the next moment it will be looking at something else:

which is why the photographs again: the record of what light will write in a second:

the salt of the film, the ash of light, the fossil of time:

as Emerson said "language is fossil poetry":

and so: each photo a poem:

each poem a photo:

a document: