Photo: I Wish I Were the Camera's Eye

A straphanger is focused on his phone as he waits for a subway train in New York City

I wish I were the camera's eye. I would watch the world the way a film camera surveys its filmic world.

I would be a rare film, one that danced when it surveyed the world, but rarely seen, not distributed like a Hollywood classic.

I am a fan of the long take. Maybe it is because I admire the way some filmmakers are able to capture a moment for as long as it can last.

I'd be the eye on a Max Ophul's film-watching Madame wind a staircase. Or, I'd be the eye in Raiders of the Lost Ark, inventorying lost treasures.

I imagine the camera's eye is lonely and I'll admit I don't agree well with loneliness - who does? - but every once in a while I just want to zoom out and take on what the philosophers call "The God's Eye View."

I'd catch myself in a frame shot - kind of like what happens when I dream. I see myself in the corner of my eye. It's me. In my own dream.

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Location: Brooklyn, NY
Photo Credit: Greig Roselli

View from the K-Mart Adjacent to the Astor Place Subway Station (6 Train)

View from K-Mart (6 train), New York City, 2011

If you enter the K-Mart at Astor Place in downtown Manhattan, go to the lower level and you can see there is an entrance to the Astor Place subway station. Get your essentials and hop on the local Lexington Avenue line. Caveat: the K-Mart is only accessible on southbound trains, though. If you are going uptown you will have to forgo this convenient lifehack.

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Poem: Riding MARTA on a Business Trip

MARTA train arrives in Atlanta's airport photograph: visitingdc

Faces I saw on the train from the airport,

twin faces painstakingly exact,
except for a
birthmark on one of their chins,
dressed in a gray hooded pullover,
one blue, one grey, a branded name, the same,

stood on their seats with a cousin or friend,
lions and lionesses
guarding
a traveling father and mother
planning, checking the stops …
don’t want to miss it …

going to the zoo, a little vacation
with the kids

said the papa

sitting right next to me

and as the train ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhed by,
a twin’s tooth came loose in the aisle seat,
between Civic Center and Peachtree.

Showcasing the discarded flesh to his brother as if
rejoicing in his difference,

jostling up to his twin, eagerly sharing his tooth,
snuggling up to him, intimacy,
the entire family of the car noticed
and sighed a collective ahhhhhhhh of parental instinct,
distracted from reading, staring out the window,
getting off, getting on,
the gapless gemini grinning
his roman face leonine, as I have said,

and switching places with his father, to calm him down,
to displace him from his brother,
he glowered in the seat, never quite glowing,
or sharing his tooth,
stowed probably in his pocket.

When the train had stopped and they had gone.
I didn’t see them again; I had turned my head and when I had looked
back,
where the twin had sat, there was an empty space,
an orange-tinted plastic seat

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"Lady" © 2006 by Greig Roselli