After a Giselle Freund Photograph And Pablo Neruda you are in blackness to the left, deep of focus, yet let still with streaks of Santiago daylight that fall between you and your son, there so far from us, once of that second. Between a door ajar and a room within there seems to lie the life, heavy with skill, dark to fingertips a surface clogged with shadow and uncertain pattern shaping the curve of years. Divided between the table and a child, your watcher and your page, your country and these skinny walls, your time and our present age, then pen we cannot see is surely silent. A question of what falls, seasons, reputations, water, glass. your son is nearer to the light and close to us, alert to what passes in the spaces after the photograph, the day, the life. --Adrian Dannatt (1993)