Cutting Scenes - The Fine Line

Conversion to Digital, A Consolation for the Aging
Barbara Westwood Diehl
Rest assured that most days
will be days of high definition,
your widescreen image not degraded,
the resolution so much sharper
than earlier broadcasts,
though there may be moments
of pixelation, of feeling
fragmented, your parts exposed,
or black bars above and below
the action, and a niggling sense
of things you might be missing,
and perhaps some audio artifacts,
some popping and hissing,
scrambled signals, like trying
so hard to convey those words
that start out as something
urgent, simple—but come out
as something else,
though these will seem
trivial as subliminal images
when you recall that once
your world was analog,
subject to snow and ghosts,
and sometimes both,
and how hard you tried
to discern the actors drifting
through their plots
like the conjured dead
you can channel now
in their true, immutable colors.
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