Thoughts on Sam Taylor Wood’s
‘Robert Downey Jr.

In the photograph, he lies on a bed
Offered like an odalisque,
An arm tenting his face.
His is a sparse room,
Adorned only by a diffuse light
That betrays nothing.
Is it the dread dawn, the twilight terror –
Those netherworlds of half-remembered anguish?
Or is it just another moment in an ordinary day?
He will not say.
Nor can we read his face,
Though we know it is painted in tears.
Does he weep for himself,
Or for the camera’s eye, the moon to his Endymion?
Does it matter when the tears still flow from the wellspring of the soul?
We marry this scene
Locate his pain in our own
And marveling, think,
This, then, is grief:
To be framed and naked in our fragility,
To recognize the dawn of despair,
To lie awake, uttering after Hamlet,
“Oh, God. God.”