The Absolute, Relatively Inaccessible. Walter Wangerin

      indifferent to the wrack of cenotaphs below.

      Most ought to know Stieglitz as the first to claim place

      for black-and-white photographs

      (art, if you please) on the walls of empurpled museums—

      MoMA of the muses;

      and most ought to know him as a paterfamilias

      in communion with young initiates

      like this broad-faced Adams fresh from the west,

      whose photos Stieglitz displayed on the walls of his “American Place.”

      3.

      Ansel’s camera, its flash, his shot of Alfred

      (the whole pictorial act)

      counts two segments

      in the unbroken helix

      that spirals back

      through countless generations of artists—

      back to the gloaming wherein God said, Light!

      Ansel’s photograph and his mentor

      (black against white walls)

      is a tribute (craft for craft)

      and a legacy (eyes for eyes)

      whereby each man defines,

      each man revises

      the dark and the daylight.

      Part 1

Snow

      Cones of Snow

      1. The Evening Vigil

      They’ve sewn Odessa’s eyelids

      closed,

      the lashes the stitching.

      The old mortician tried for a smile,

      but settled for an inane

      twist of her lips.

      Once as black and as rich

      as a grand-black piano,

      Odessa’s complexion’s stained sallow;

      eyeglasses askew

      on the bridge of her nose

      What? The woman wore glasses?

      There’s a knoll in Oakhill Cemetery,

      fenced to define the plots

      reserved for Negroes.

      2. Graveside, Afternoon

      Rev Leroy and I stand alone

      beside the open hole:

      “Earth. Ashes. Dust.”

      The Rev snaps closed his Bible

      and quits the canvas canopy

      billowing in the wintry wind.

      Two white groundskeepers

      unwinch the casket down:

      ta-tocka ta-tocka, ta-tocka—

      “Hurry up, Joe!

      I’m frost-bit!”

      3. Dusk

      I drive home under the streetlamps

      that swing from crossed wires

      above the intersections.

      The light of a single streetlamp

      forms in the air before me

      a ghostly cone of snow,

      the cone’s low circle

      of fallen light

      lying on a loose inch of snow.

      4. Noonday

      A warm Indian-summer sun

      melts the snow that last night

      mounded Miz Odessa’s tomb,

      dissolves the headstone

      that should have stood memorial

      to the woman’s weary life.

      Milk and Snow in Three Declensions

      1.

      The December snows muffle the sounds of human vowels.

      The sibilant ice cracks the distance like a rifle shot.

      2.

      Before we can see the horse-drawn milk wagon

      laboring uphill

      (“I’ll see it first!”

      “Look out for me, Wally,

      cause I’m gonna see it first!!”)

      Before the mare pulls

      the metal, butter-colored wagon

      around the corner to our street,