PORTRAIT OF MY FATHER AS AN ARTIST

Everyone I know is shaped by what their fathers do. And by do, I mean the way they live. My father got me thinking young about pictures since he was a photographer. I think about helping him iron this gigantic white curtain we used to string across the wall of a gymnaisum where he took group and individual pictures at a local dance studio. I helped him for many years. There were these rings--you know, the ones you see gymnsts on in the olympics--and one year, I reached up and said, "Dad, I think they lowered the rings."

My own lack of attention for what was happening to my body has a lot to do with how I started to see the world and myself. Where my father and I depart as artists is on the image itself. Recognition of the image is enough for a photographer. If it looks good, take the picture. Not so for a poet. Instead, I have to take a kind of picture and then try and forget it. Remembering it, it surfaces with attached meanings and weights of the subconscious and recent events of my life, which may or may not adjust the way the image appears.

At home, growing up, I answered the phone, "Hello, Newman's." Even now, I wear Newman Photography T-shirts, which are Ts from my youth when I played baseball and my father sponsored a team. It's a little depressing that I still fit into those T-shirts.

This is a new poem about my love of the image, not the picture. If my father could read poetry deeply, I'm sure he would be touched that his way of seeing led me to mine.


NEGATIVE

Tell me again—
your shadow
is really just
my absence in light.
In the shower,
wedged under
woman and water,
I wait to rinse
my hair. Turning
with closed eyes,
all I can sense
is what’s
immeasurable:

—beautiful darkness,
a slender shape
floating across
a curtain of light,
puncturing it,
then erasing her
absence before
mine can be missed.