CAMERAS

In Piazza Questa or Quella licking my chocolate ice cream

I adorn once more the European tourist scene.

All around the snouts of cameras protrude

To swallow gothic saints, heroes in bronze, and squealing brood,

With adventitious me

Included accidentally.

That gives me pause! Say Muse, how many are the silver screens,

How many are the album-leaves where, since my teens,

I’ve done my bit as extra in the crowd

Behind the wives or domes the pictures were about?

In France, Japan, the States, Peru,

Maybe in very Timbuctoo!

I stand, I sit, I gape, I doze,

I eat a grape, I scratch my nose,

Ignored, to make this poem brief, by countless eyes

I can’t, alas, advise

That he who slurps the ice cream in the rear is Oscar, me, the Only One:

Among the geese an unregarded swan.

[Questa, quella: this, that. I have never visited Peru and Timbuctoo, but the poem doesn’t care. As for the fourth stanza, it points, obviously, to an already distant past in photographic technology.]