Diane Arbus is studying a couple
looking at her photograph,
“Girl in a shiny dress.”
She’s reading the couple’s faces,
the curl of the corner
of the woman’s mouth, the knit
of her brow. She wants her to nod
in approval; no, she just wants
them to feel something and forget
where they are. But the man wears
a smirk, then remarks, “Even I
can take this picture.” She plucks
out her pocket-sized notebook,
flips to a fresh page and scribbles
what he said. There is a war.
My oldest sister is still a virgin
and vaguely resembles the woman
in the photo “Girl in a Shiny Dress.”
There is a war, and when
both sides decide to call it quits,
there will be a U.S. tally of 58,000 dead.
I am ten, bone-spare and formless,
mimicking a new dance. The exhibit’s
theme is the “New Social Landscape.”
In the Summer of Love
Diane Arbus prowls our street.
She buys a postcard in the Haight
and joins the antiwar movement.
She writes to a friend in London
about her show at the MoMA
and in her diary confesses
that she adores freaks. In her
Moleskine notebook, she records
another photograph of a man
right out of a Flannery O’Connor
story: a portrait of intensity,
a face fraught with good intentions.
“Boy with a Straw Hat Waiting
to March in a Pro-war Parade.”
Around Christmas, “I Second
That Emotion” is the most popular
song on the radio, and Smokey
Robinson’s porcelain voice testifies
to keep us where we were,
a sound telling us that he’s
bitten into the moon’s dark
flesh to hold the stars
in their place. And all of us stayed
put in our small but brilliant
constellation, managing to escape
unscathed from the camera’s long gaze.
Originally appeared in Dogwood Volume 5: 2005
