slack at his waist,
holding the stem of his eyeglasses
loosely between his fingers.
The old photographer wears a black
double-breasted suit:
a buttoned vest, rumpled pants,
and a white, open-collared shirt.
But his slouch (which discomposes the hang of the jacket)
and his insouciance (one jacket-flap fully in its pocket,
the other, one corner in, one corner out)
belie the suit’s formality.
Alfred’s eyes are as distant as white-noise,
the lip-edge of his moustache
sheared as straight
as a technical principle.
2.
Most folks know Ansel Adams as a photographer
in awe-full communion with the violent moon,
that argent globe fixed in midnight,
indifferent to the wrack of cenotaphs below.
Most ought to know Stieglitz as the first to claim place
for black-and-white photographs
(art, if you please) on the walls of empurpled museums—
MoMA of the muses;
and most ought to know him as a paterfamilias
in communion with young initiates
like this broad-faced Adams fresh from the west,
whose photos Stieglitz displayed on the walls of his “American Place.”
3.
Ansel’s camera, its flash, his shot of Alfred
(the whole pictorial act)
counts two segments
in the unbroken helix
that spirals back
through countless generations of artists—
back to the gloaming wherein God said, Light!
Ansel’s photograph and his mentor
(black against white walls)
is a tribute (craft for craft)
and a legacy (eyes for eyes)
whereby each man defines,
each man revises
the dark and the daylight.
Part 1
Cones of Snow
1. The Evening Vigil
They’ve sewn Odessa’s eyelids
closed,
the lashes the stitching.
The old mortician tried for a smile,
but settled for an inane
twist of her lips.
Once as black and as rich
as a grand-black piano,
Odessa’s complexion’s stained sallow;
eyeglasses askew
on the bridge of her nose
What? The woman wore glasses?
There’s a knoll in Oakhill Cemetery,
fenced to define the plots
reserved for Negroes.
2. Graveside, Afternoon
Rev Leroy and I stand alone
beside the open hole:
“Earth. Ashes. Dust.”
The Rev snaps closed his Bible
and quits the canvas canopy
billowing in the wintry wind.
Two white groundskeepers
unwinch the casket down:
ta-tocka ta-tocka, ta-tocka—
“Hurry up, Joe!
I’m frost-bit!”
3. Dusk
I drive home under the streetlamps
that swing from crossed wires
above the intersections.
The light of a single streetlamp
forms in the air before me
a ghostly cone of snow,
the cone’s low circle
of fallen light
lying on a loose inch of snow.
4. Noonday
A warm Indian-summer sun
melts the snow that last night
mounded Miz Odessa’s tomb,
dissolves the headstone
that should have stood memorial
to the woman’s weary life.
Milk and Snow in Three Declensions
1.
The December snows muffle the sounds of human vowels.
The sibilant ice cracks the distance like a rifle shot.
2.
Before
