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      December 8, 2010Film Color, 1950Drew Foti-Straus

      In order to create color home movies, families
      could send their black and white film to
      companies which would add color to it using
      stencils and dyes.

      As I watch my mother’s family,
      on our living room television, I see the way
      the man who took their movie changed them.
      The man I picture set up

      on a broad glass desk
      lit from below. Covered with their film
      it looked like a dragonfly wing. When
      my mother’s family sent in their home movie, maybe

      he bent over the images and slowly criticized
      the limits of their instructions. How as
      he sat down with the exquisite brush,
      any gesture was a sentence.

      I suspect the holes in
      my memory are beginning
      to seep. I know the eye
      is used to seeing reflected light.

      In his line of work,
      missing details left entire
      neighborhoods to be
      rebuilt by his intuition,
      his ideal color scheme,
      as he added pastel dye
      to the daily emulsion,
      to the early ridges of my
      grandfather’s fishing-line face.
      One frame could contain
      a house so bright
      it was like a swarm of bees.

      Or a house this color, right
      here, the color that fills the house
      with children, that keeps away
      questions like who will break the bread?
      Who will take up that worn flute?
      The color that sets them up
      to be remembered as they truly were.

      When I watch my six-year-old mother,
      her eyes are the wrong color. He is the keeper
      of that memory, or maybe
      somewhere in the infinite
      expanse of space my mother
      grows up in a house with blue eyes,
      rides a tractor
      and I watch. The man
      creates my mother, I
      color her life, and she goes on
      exploding and contracting
      so fast you could mistake it
      for a single point of light.

      from #33 - Summer 2010