Poem: "Securities/Agency"

Securities/Agency

Inspired by Dorothea Lange’s Tractored Out, Childress County, Texas, 1938,
A photograph taken during her tenure with the Farm Security Administration

I. Security

The government controlled the development
process, kept a tight grip on the negatives,
dictated just what and just how much
truth was released to the public.
But they underestimated the power:
speed of the shutter, grip of the lens,
how one woman could harness blatant lies
told by natural light. She could photograph a soul
without a single body trapped in the picture.

II. Agency

We did not know, some sixty years prior,
we’d been caught in a frame. The taxed-out
state of soil not yet evident,
sold undisclosed. We did not know
our new coat of paint would peel like dead
skin from a clapboard farmhouse in the heart
of drought. Can we be blamed for our love, long
dead before the purchase—a gray-scale field,
one thousand rows, monochrome rainbows
bled fruitless to frowns?





















Image Courtesy of Christie's; Lot 21, Sale 1451

Poem: "Opening the Daguerreotype"

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.