At the Richard Avedon Exhibit in Paris

This room echoes with shuffling feet.

Speakers of all languages

come to pay reverence

to the geography of the human face

and there are more luminaries
of modern culture than I can count:

Marianne Moore, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote.

All are rendered in life-sized black and white,
with crisp lines, and caught mid-expression, as if talking, reciting, playing,
going on unaware of the tool intended to stop time fixed on their movements.

First there is Beckett, dignified, taller than I am.
I wait for him to hold out his hand for me to shake,
or to loan me his pocket-kerchief. On another wall, Louis Armstrong vibes so fully his eyes are blurred, Marianne Moore in a three cornered hat looks to be in the middle of a recitation.

Marilyn Monroe has been caught looking down in the only moment of doubt and fear

I have ever seen shown on her face,and there is Malcolm, steadily staring the camera down,
and it goes on...

What strikes me is how

all are alive in this room.

These shapers of our culture- all are dead

and yet collected, beyond death, they make a symphony of their influence.

One face draws my curiosity:

it is closed in emotion, in a moment of total honesty and complete absorption,
the beard is pointed, the face dear, and I approach to study the lines

not knowing I am looking at the father of modern poetry.
Ezra Pound, the plaque says, is at Williams' house
hours before his final expatriation.
I did not recognize him with his eyes contorted with memory, his mouth mid-word.

I want to hold his hand and pat his tired cheeks,
tip back in a rocking chair on that porch
and ask about leaving, arriving, hope, fear, and reason.
And for no reason, I have to leave the room so the Parisians
don't see my weak American tears.

Even his portrait artist is gone now, dead four years,
and for the first time I understand the equation
vita brevis, ars longus .

They, who are outlived by their portraits seem to be outlived
by their very souls, and we, fortunate enough to know them again,
take in their eyes, and carry them on,
their weightless weight.