Gaillardia Aristata in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility

………..The way in which human perception is organized—the medium in which it occurs— is
_____..conditioned not only by nature but by history.
………………—W. Benjamin

………I.        The beautiful object invites reproduction;
………II.      What is natural is remade as image, as object;
………III.    The image raises the question: what  how  we see::

………………:: We sing over a field of spintop red,
………………:: we praise the carnivorous firewheel.
………………:: We weave these blanketflowers for the dead;
………………:: those we do not count, we must conceal.
……………………..The image raises the question:

………………:: We praise the carnivorous firewheel,
………………:: we forget the torchlight frenzy of pixels.
………………:: Those we will not count, we conceal,
………………:: our slumber, a lightless vigil.
…………………….The image raises the question:

………………:: Forget the torchlight frenzy of pixels—
………………:: we burn our eyes in perennial sun.
………………:: Our slumber a lightless vigil,
………………:: we sup and relish the simulacrum.
…………………….The image raises the question:

………………:: We burn our eyes in perennial sun,
………………:: we anoint the field with spintop red.
………………:: We sup on a hellish simulacrum
………………:: and leave no flowers for the dead.

…………………….The image raises this question: what how
……………………………………………………………………….how long
……………………………….we’ll see:

–

An ossuary, dark
j

as        light        emptied        –      clay

silence   –    the    body      dampened

these  hands – now the  skin  wilding

the          cold           singular          sea

wondering   stones  –  the  planetary

beyond    us   –   actual      dispersals

darkling – keep us – light  this  sleep

though     the     bulbs     –       unroot

every  thing   at  once  an indifferent

departure – an odd hour  –  still early

so               lately           undone          –

____

Julie Phillips Brown is the author of The Adjacent Possible (forthcoming from Green Writers Press in 2021). Her writing has appeared in Borderlands, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Interim, Nashville Review, Plume, Posit, Vinyl, Yemassee, and elsewhere. She is currently a Society Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.