Opening the Daguerreotype
When I hold her against the light, just so,
fury takes her face with a flash.
Like white fire, it burns a skin that is thinner
than bible paper or mountain air.
This, an old theory on the body:
ghost-like layers, interlocking—
a delicate sheet of her neatly torn.
She’s been betrayed by day-
light, arrested in this silver-coated picture,
caged beneath the weight of scratched glass.
It is as though she feels my thoughts
before my fingers pressure
her dry, cracked spine or close
the worn red leather door. She pleads:
Dissolve me.
Make me whole.
*****************************
A daguerreotype was one of the earliest forms of photographs, developed and used around the late 1830s/early 1840s. They were usually made of silver or silver-coated copper plates and were extremely sensitive to light. Therefore, to be properly preserved, each daguerreotype was housed in its own case that closed with a clasp. Back then, people were pretty leery of photographs, as a common belief was that with each photo you posed for a layer of your soul was taken from you and forever trapped.
My former father-in-law had a truck load of these, and he loaned me one to share with my History of Photography class. She was so beautiful that I had to write a poem for her. I believe the current home of all his daguerreotypes is the Virginia Musuem of Fine Arts in Richmond.
Lovely
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