The Photographer

© Ash Adams


The Photographer

It was at first to see the light,
immortalize its truths as stars mute and flat—
sun sighing over stairs,
the silvering humanity in an artist’s gaze,
crumbling and daggered
as a city,
profoundly unfinished—

It was at first to stand at the edge of a sea,
the universe bared open brightly,
doubled and backwards,
blown out secrets pitted in washes of ink.

But in these moments of starlight,
space spills like truth:

a boy thighing into dark places,
folding into a warm girl in a fallow field
beneath a spray of northern lights,
straining to see
not the firmness of her brow or the hollow place in her chest,
but that man-moon in the black of her eyes
hovering as a corpse.

In a fractured second’s exposure
see
not the stars,
but a child
running to the place in the forest
where the light falls off,
quivering awake that bit of unknowing
to something darker, something true.

                                                  --Ash Adams (originally published in The Dirty Napkin literary journal)