had logo
Two Figures photo

August 27, 2020

Two Figures

Joshua Garcia

after David Hockney 

There are two of you (you being singular, but in two forms). One of you is 
in motion, swimming in marbled light; standing by the pool, one of you is not.

A vision of yourself, or a version, it’s unclear which, cuts through the water.
Perhaps it’s some of both, your likeness caught in a photographic emulsion 

that drops to the floor like a shadow (but made of light) severed from its spring. 
The figure slows as it bends the path you thought you were on, warm and cool, 

a steaming apparition, a morning. The object in the mirror is closer than it appears. 
Its arms move when yours stay still; its legs peel apart, electric, under the caress

of reflection, of dispersion. You propel yourself forward even as you stand in place. 
Your arms break with a gleam, the dark flash of a blade husking the silk off the quiet

of yourself, moving closer to the figure standing by the pool, standing against the sun,
the way a vine grows new shoots from the same source, changing directions, turning.