Narcissus, Photographer by Erica Jong
"...a frozen memory, like any photo, where nothing is missing, not even, and especially, nothingness..." -- Julio Cortázar, "Blow Up"
Mirror-mad, he photographed reflections: sunstorms in puddles, cities in canals,
double portraits framed in sunglasses, the fat phantoms who dance on the flanks of cars.
Nothing caught his eye unless it bent or glistered over something else.
He trapped clouds in bottles the way kids trap grasshoppers. Then one misty day
he was stopped by the windshield. Behind him, an avenue of trees,
before him, the mirror of that scene. He seemed to enter what, in fact, he left.
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