East VillageManhattan
My friend, award-winning poet Teresa Gilman, has graciously allowed me to use one of her poems to accompany this photo.
You can't do anything quietly. Things break
in your hands, slide out and crash, burn
to the ground in seconds.
Some fantastic motor hums in you, it buzzes
where you sit wriggling. You collide with air.
Your joy in the movement of hips, knees, your very toenails
makes me catch my breath between stories in my lap.
Your flesh squeaks and itches, you jerk away
just when I reach to lift you up. And often right out loud
in company your shockwaves ruffle curtains, edges, knobs.
Squirming godchild with slicked black hair and tied
shoes, hands folded, feet stuck out on a sofa yet to be undone
by the all too short streak of you
racing through without destination.
Boy Energy
(for Nate)
(for Nate)
You can't do anything quietly. Things break
in your hands, slide out and crash, burn
to the ground in seconds.
Some fantastic motor hums in you, it buzzes
where you sit wriggling. You collide with air.
Your joy in the movement of hips, knees, your very toenails
makes me catch my breath between stories in my lap.
Your flesh squeaks and itches, you jerk away
just when I reach to lift you up. And often right out loud
in company your shockwaves ruffle curtains, edges, knobs.
Squirming godchild with slicked black hair and tied
shoes, hands folded, feet stuck out on a sofa yet to be undone
by the all too short streak of you
racing through without destination.
5 comments:
"Raul", "Ramona", and the two Untitled"....fantastic! I love your black and white work especially. Of Raul, I wondered how long you stood there until you got just that expression.
Wonderful.
FA
Thanks, FA. Yes, I like working in black and white. It captures nuances of expression and nuances of light and shadow that color just can't get. When I shoot in 35mm, it's exclusively in black and white. And increasingly, it's my medium of choice in digital, if the subject warrants it. And it often warrants it.
OK, about this beautiful kid. I was sitting on a curb with my friend clicking away at another subject, and he comes walking up to me with his sister, who is maybe a year or two older. "Won't you take my picture?" he asked. I forgot all about what I had been doing and just began clicking away. This shot was taken about 10 seconds into the sequence of three or four photos I took.
If the future of our world depends upon kids like this, then maybe we'll be OK after all.
Ooops ... I see you were talking about the photo of my friend Raul. That shot didn't take long to capture at all. He looks sad in this image, but the truth is he is concentrating on a banana split (cropped out of the photo) that he had just bought from the ice cream truck that stopped out front of his building. Ramona bought one, too, and hers is visible in the shot.
Well, thanks for telling me about the "untitled" kid too. He has that smile-in-your-face kid energy. That boy energy. I once wrote a poem about that.
FA
I would like to read it.
Meanwhile, I've posted two more photographs from that sequence.
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