Charles Dodgson Looking at Alice Liddell

Today, a young man

sees teacups and cards as possible first principles,

wonders about queens, croquet and language,

invents new kinds of butterflies, adjusts

his collar in the mirror.

She is not golden, nor does she pout—

wary of cameras and inventive minds,

self-consciously ragged in a Victorian study

under that artificial sexless eye, or

leaning out of a boat in July,

smiling blithely and pretending it isn’t raining.

Her veins are blue as the small snakes

from which he shies, her teeth

thin flakes pickaxed from white rock.

He does not look at her mouth.

She is suspicious of guile, so

he pauses, stricken

by painful, stainless, unaffected love,

sincere as childhood, and as remote.

The camera pleads his case,

a silent chaperone, an entryway

and sanctuary too, from time and place,

keeping her with him always

safe and dry, away

from the riff-raff and banal

expressions of the everyday.

A gaze so plain

that she will love him even when

the sentimental haze fades

and he is left

lonesome and boring, an old lecturer

in spotless clothes.

Today though, he is

with her,

fortified from time—

this machine, this mirror

through which a past is never past, and all

you were, will always be—

if only in a desk drawer, for the tentative eyes

and prayerful dreams of melancholy men.