after the Photographer, Albert Renger-Patzsch
for Michael Kinsley
Perhaps it’s the absence of color that draws him near to this tree.
It is small, thin, and like a stark crow—
it waits for no one.
There is a white field and a white sky
turns beneath the branches.
The first rains have not yet come. And yet
it is winter. There is no sound from the distant
shots, or the hospital filled
with the wounded….
Not a breath of wind, no birds or perpetual smoke
from the empty houses in the village.
Perhaps he imagines the sky as a frame of silence?
The tree, a sort of contrast, a line
drawn with chalk.
He has waited a long time to find this tree,
alone, in a somber moment.
Imagine the moon—as he adjusts the lens,
his subject focused into deeper light so that it’s almost dark
a few yards back from the branches.
Is it not like a small boat,
drawing us close to the shore?
Originally published in Cider Press Review, Volume 1.
