L'Écho Visuel

Lyrics

The light from the streetlamp… 
it makes a line when I turn my head.
Just for a second.
A yellow crayon streak against the dark.

You waved goodbye from the platform.
The train was late, November something.
And your hand… it waved three times at once.
One real, and two ghosts following.
A stutter in the film of the world.
Morris Bender wrote it down in '45.
He gave the phenomenon a name.
He never saw your hand.

It’s the visual echo.
The ghost of the gesture.
A wrinkle in the seeing, a trail left behind.
You are already gone, but your movement, it lingers.
The light hasn't learned how to let you go.
L'écho visuel.

The fluorescent bulb in the kitchen hums and flickers.
It paints a white scar across the ceiling tiles
every time I look away.
I try to read the paper, but the words leave their shadows.
The black ink bleeds into the white space,
a memory of what I just read.
I trace the ghost letters with my finger.

It’s the visual echo.
The ghost of the gesture.
A wrinkle in the seeing, a trail left behind.
You are already gone, but your movement, it lingers.
The light hasn't learned how to let you go.
L'écho visuel.

In the clinic, they called it a disturbance.
A persistence.
They asked me to follow the red dot on the wall.
But all I could see was the phantom of its journey.
A red comet's tail.
Is it my eye that remembers, or my heart?
A little spark of ozone, after the fact.
The accent that stays when the word is finished.

Your hand on the platform.
The first wave.
The second.
The third.
Still hanging in the air.
A photograph made of light and time.
Just for a second.
Just… forever.