enters my room both customer and father.
3. Bellocq
APRIL 1911
There comes a quiet man now to my room—
Papá Bellocq, his camera on his back.
He wants nothing, he says, but to take me
as I would arrange myself, fully clothed—
a brooch at my throat, my white hat angled
just so—or not, the smooth map of my flesh
awash in afternoon light. In my room
everything’s a prop for his composition—
brass spittoon in the corner, the silver
mirror, brush and comb of my toilette.
I try to pose as I think he would like—shy
at first, then bolder. I’m not so foolish
that I don’t know this photograph we make
will bear the stamp of his name, not mine.
4. Blue Book
JUNE 1911
I wear my best gown for the picture—
white silk with seed pearls and ostrich feathers—
my hair in a loose chignon. Behind me,
Bellocq’s black scrim just covers the laundry—
tea towels, bleached and frayed, drying on the line.
I look away from his lens to appear
demure, to attract those guests not wanting
the lewd sights of Emma Johnson’s circus.
Countess writes my description for the book—
“Violet,” a fair-skinned beauty, recites
poetry and soliloquies; nightly
she performs her tableau vivant, becomes
a living statue, an object of art—
and I fade again into someone I’m not.
5. Portrait #1
JULY 1911
Here, I am to look casual, even
frowsy, though still queen of my boudoir.
A moment caught as if by accident—
pictures crooked on the walls, newspaper
sprawled on the dresser, a bit of pale silk
spilling from a drawer, and my slip pulled
below my white shoulders, décolleté,
black stockings, legs crossed easy as a man’s.
All of it contrived except for the way
the flowered walls dominate the backdrop
and close in on me as I pose, my hand
at rest on my knee, a single finger
raised, arching toward the camera—a gesture
before speech, before the first word comes out.
6. Portrait #2
AUGUST 1911
I pose nude for this photograph, awkward,
one arm folded behind my back, the other
limp at my side. Seated, I raise my chin,
my back so straight I imagine the bones
separating in my spine, my neck lengthening
like evening shadow. When I see this plate
I try to recall what I was thinking—
how not to be exposed, though naked, how
to wear skin like a garment, seamless.
Bellocq thinks I’m right for the camera, keeps
coming to my room. These plates are fragile,
he says, showing me how easy it is
to shatter this image of myself, how
a quick scratch carves a scar across my chest.
7. Photography
OCTOBER 1911
Bellocq talks to me about light, shows me
how to use shadow, how to fill the frame
with objects—their intricate positions.
I thrill to the magic of it—silver
crystals like constellations of stars
arranging on film. In the negative
the whole world reverses, my black dress turned
white, my skin blackened to pitch. Inside out,
I said, thinking of what I’ve tried to hide.
I follow him now, watch him take pictures.
I look at what he can see through his lens
and what he cannot—silverfish behind
the walls, the yellow tint of a faded bruise—
other things here, what the camera misses.
8. Disclosure
JANUARY 1912
When Bellocq doesn’t like a photograph
he scratches across the plate. But I know
other ways to obscure a face—paint it
with rouge and powder, shades lighter than skin,
don a black velvet mask. I’ve learned to keep
my face behind the camera, my lens aimed
at a dream of my own making. What power
I find in transforming what is real—a room
flushed with light, calculated disarray.
Today I tried to capture a redbird
perched on the tall hedge. As my shutter fell,
he lifted in flight, a vivid blur above
the clutter just beyond the hedge—garbage,
rats licking the insides of broken eggs.
9. Spectrum
FEBRUARY 1912
No sun, and the city’s a dull palette
of gray—weathered ships docked at the quay, rats
dozing in the hull, drizzle slicking dark stones
of the streets. Mornings such as these, I walk
among the weary, their eyes sunken
as if each body, diseased and dying,
would pull itself inside, back to the shining
center. In the cemetery, all the rest,
their resolute bones stacked against the pull
of the Gulf. Here, another world teems—flies
buzzing the meat-stand, cockroaches crisscrossing
the banquette, the curve and flex of larvae
in the cisterns, and mosquitoes skimming
flat water like skaters on a frozen pond.
10. (Self) Portrait
MARCH 1912
On the crowded street I want to stop
time, hold it captive in my dark chamber—
a train’s sluggish pull out of the station,
passengers waving through open windows,
the dull faces of those left on the platform.
Once, I boarded a train; leaving my home,
I watched the red sky, the low sun glowing—
an ember I could blow into flame—night
falling and my past darkening behind me.
Now I wait for a departure, the whistle’s
shrill calling. The first time I tried this shot
I thought of my mother shrinking against
the horizon—so distracted, I looked into
a capped lens, saw only my own clear eye.
III
Native Guard
For my mother
Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough
in memory
Memory is a cemetery
I’ve visited once or twice, white
ubiquitous and the set-aside
Everywhere under foot . . .
—Charles Wright
Theories of Time and Space
You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.
Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:
head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off
another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion—dead end
at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches
in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand
dumped on the mangrove swamp—buried
terrain of the past. Bring only
what you must carry—tome of memory,
its random blank pages. On the dock
where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:
the photograph—who you were—
will be waiting when you return.
I
I’m going there to meet my mother
She said she’d meet me when I come
I’m only going over Jordan
I’m only going over home.
—Traditional
The Southern Crescent
1
In 1959 my mother is boarding a train.
She is barely sixteen, her one large grip
bulging with homemade dresses, whisper
of crinoline and lace, her name stitched
inside each one. She is leaving behind
the dirt roads of Mississippi, the film
of red dust around her ankles, the thin
whistle of wind through the floorboards
of the shotgun house, the very idea of home.
Ahead of her, days of travel, one town
after the next, and California—a word
she can’t stop repeating. Over and over
she will practice meeting her father, imagine
how he must look, how different now
from the one photo she has of him. She will
look at it once more, pulling into the station
at Los Angeles, and then again and again
on the platform, no one like him in sight.
2
The year the old Crescent makes its last run,
my mother insists we ride it together.
We leave Gulfport late morning, heading east.
Years before, we rode together to meet
another man, my father, waiting for us
as our train derailed. I don’t recall how
she must have held me, how her face sank
as she realized, again, the uncertainty
of it all—that trip, too, gone wrong. Today,
she is sure we can leave home, bound only
for whatever awaits us, the sun now
setting behind us, the rails humming
like anticipation, the train pulling us
toward the end of another day. I watch
each small town pass before my window
until the light goes, and the reflection
of my mother’s face appears, clearer now
as evening comes on, dark and certain.
Genus Narcissus
Faire daffadills, we weep to see
You haste away so soone.
—Robert Herrick
The road I walked home from school
was dense with trees and shadow, creek-side,
and lit by yellow daffodils, early blossoms
bright against winter’s last gray days.
I must have known they grew wild, thought
no harm in taking them. So I did—
gathering up as many as I could hold,
then presenting them, in a jar, to my mother.
She put them on the sill, and I sat nearby
watching light bend through the glass,
day easing into evening, proud of myself
for giving my mother some small thing.
Childish vanity. I must have seen in them
some measure of myself—the slender stems,
each blossom a head lifted up
toward praise, or bowed to meet its reflection.
Walking home those years ago, I knew nothing
of Narcissus or the daffodils’ short spring—
how they’d dry like graveside flowers, rustling
when the wind blew—a whisper, treacherous,
from the sill. Be taken with yourself,
they said to me; Die early, to my mother.
Graveyard Blues
It rained the whole time we were laying her down;
Rained from church to grave when we put her down.
The suck of mud at our feet was a hollow sound.
When the preacher called out I held up my hand;
When he called for a witness I raised my hand—
Death stops the body’s work, the soul’s a journeyman.
The sun came out when I turned to walk away,
Glared down on me as I turned and walked away—
My back to my mother, leaving her where she lay.
The road going home was pocked with holes,
That home-going road’s always full of holes;
Though we slow down, time’s wheel still rolls.
I wander now among names of the dead:
My mother’s name, stone pillow for my head.
What the Body Can Say
Even in stone the gesture is unmistakable—
the man upright, though on his knees, spine
arched, head flung back, and, covering his eyes,
his fingers spread across his face. I think
grief, and since he’s here, in the courtyard
of the divinity school, what he might ask of God.
How easy it is to read this body’s language,
or those gestures we’ve come to know—the raised thumb
that is both a symbol of agreement and the request
for a ride, the two fingers held up that once meant
victory, then peace. But what was my mother saying
that day not long before her death—her face tilted up
at me, her mouth falling open, wordless, just as
we open our mouths in church to take in the wafer,
meaning communion? What matters is context—
the side of the road, or that my mother wanted
something I still can’t name: what, kneeling,
my face behind my hands, I might ask of God.
Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971
Why the rough edge of beauty? Why
the tired face of a woman, suffering,
made luminous by the camera’s eye?
Or the storm that drives us inside
for days, power lines down, food rotting
in the refrigerator, while outside
the landscape glistens beneath a glaze
of ice? Why remember anything
but the wonder of those few days,
the iced trees, each leaf in its glassy case?
The picture we took that first morning,
the front yard a beautiful, strange place—
why on the back has someone made a list
of our names, the date, the event: nothing
of what’s inside—mother, stepfather’s fist?
What Is Evidence
Not the fleeting bruises she’d cover
with makeup, a dark patch as if imprint
of a scope she’d pressed her eye too close to,
looking for a way out, nor the quiver
in the voice she’d steady, leaning
into a pot of bones on the stove. Not
the teeth she wore in place of her own, or
the official document—its seal
and smeared signature—fading already,
the edges wearing. Not the tiny marker
with its dates, her name, abstract as history.
Only the landscape of her body—splintered
clavicle, pierced temporal—her thin bones
settling a bit each day, the way all things do.
Letter
At the post office, I dash a note to a friend,
tell her I’ve just moved in, gotten settled, that
I’m now rushing off on an errand—except
that I write errant, a slip between letters,
each with an upright backbone anchoring it
to the page. One has with it the fullness
of possibility, a shape almost like the O
my friend’s mouth will make when she sees
my letter in her box; the other, a mark that crosses
like the flat line of your death, the symbol
over the church house door, the ashes on your forehead
some Wednesday I barely remember.
What was I saying? I had to cross the word out,
start again, explain what I know best
because of the way
you left me: how suddenly
a simple errand, a letter—everything—can go wrong.
After Your Death
First, I emptied the closets of your clothes,
threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised
from your touch, left empty the jars
you bought for preserves. The next morning,
birds rustled the fruit trees, and later
when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem,
I found it half eaten, the other side
already rotting, or—like another I plucked
and split open—being taken from the inside:
a swarm of insects hollowing it. I’m too late,
again, another space emptied by loss.
Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.
Myth
I was asleep while you were dying.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow
I make between my slumber and my waking,
the Erebus I keep you in, still trying
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow,
but in dreams you live. So I try taking
you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning,
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
Again and again, this constant forsaking.
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