As a Benediction

There’s a photograph where she’s just stopped
running, her head turned back to see who was,

or is, or had been following her, & seeing no one
& nothing but a haze of fog that’s almost

collapsing, filling in the spaces her body had
torn through as she ran. If you listen close enough 

you might hear what must be the echoes 
of her dress shoes on pavement, the heels short 

enough to run in but enough, she must’ve felt,
to make a difference. The echoes will blur with 

the swirling cries of nighthawks that could be 
mistaken for someone with a sore throat

whispering a lover’s name as a benediction,
or just in the hope whoever’s nearby will turn out

to mean no harm. Maybe it’s best not to try
to hear anything with clarity in a photograph,

which isn’t about sound but light. How 
the lit tip of the cigarette in her left hand

is a blur of motion toward her lips 
which have just finished forming the last syllable 

of your name. At least that’s what you hear 
looking at the photo. What you’ve always heard.

The nighthawks, crying forlorn in that moment
of sky that is still, & will always be, the past,

are just shadowy hints of what might be
motion too far out of focus to be certain

that’s what they are. When you hear them you don’t
know if what you’re listening to is in the shadows

of the photograph or from birds careening in
the actual night sky, & though at first the fact

you can’t know for sure is an inconvenience,
after a time it will come to mean the world.

GEORGE LOONEY

George Looney’s story collection from BOA Editions is The Visibility of Things Long Submerged. Other recent books include Ode to the Earth in Translation, The Worst May Be Over, which won the Elixir Press Fiction Award, and The Itinerate Circus: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020. He founded the Creative Writing BFA Program at Penn State Erie, is editor of Lake Effect, and translation editor of Mid-American Review.