Who are they,
these men and
women, accelerated by camera speed
and walking
feverishly in grainy black and white footage
with celluloid dots
appearing and disappearing,
with jagged horizontal lines
and sharp edits
as they dodge trolleys,
horses, and mules,
play stick ball,
tag, lean on chummy shoulders
in anachronistic New York?
They wear long skirts
and dress shoes,
suits and ties
and hats,
knickers tucked
into high boots,
aprons of cloth,
denim, or leather
as they cross
the street,
mug for a camera on a tripod,
sell newspapers
and vegetables at the Italian market,
buy penny whistles at the open-air
five and dime
or hurry to work
uptown
in brick
buildings and skyscrapers
on a concrete
island floating on film.
What are
their concerns,
their
occupations, loves, or debaucheries?
What are their
passions now silenced by headstones
and tamped down
by dates of birth and death,
bookends to the
frenzy of their pilgrimage,
double-time
marching to careers and ledgers
or rotund wives
making soup for lunch,
pounding
pavement on stuttering reels
caught on
sprockets, gears, metal teeth
and their
turn-of-the-century
black and white
ways?
A man with a
bushy white mustache
holds forth,
standing square before the lens,
expounding some
arcane explanation,
some answer to
these downtown riddles
as he adjusts
his coat and natty bow tie.
He tilts his
head left to right,
puffs on a pipe
and gives the smoke away,
then smiles, a
newspaper tucked under his arm,
folded thin pulp holding no clues.
A tip of his
cap, and he’s gone.
His message, I
believe, was this:
We’re all here,
but move fast.
The film may
break at any time.
Carpe diem. Chop
chop.
The master comes
at an hour you least expect.
We all end up on
the cutting room floor.
~William Hammett
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