The Terminal
—After Alfred Steiglitz’s photograph, 1893
Because what’s cropped from the scene is
everything, really — Gibson Girls with frizzled bangs
finally ditching their corsets, the wooden pegs
aging Civil War vets used to prop their phantom
legs clicking their last down the cobblestone,
your President hiding a bloom of
cancer in his mouth. Even your dear
Georgia — the love for which we all know you
now — well, she was still a child humming
her alphabet down a dirt road, miles and miles away.
And you, Alfred, no, I can’t see you either:
like a minor god off in the corner
of his creation, you’re invisible but the perspective’s
yours. I can almost conjure you back, back when
you were all moustache, a tall drink of dark
ale shuffling around the city until you
found this — an image — one worth keeping, a scene
of a blizzard finally settling outside you and within.
Oh, you remember the one: that shot you took
with a brand new invention that used aperture to make
artifact, the shot taken at the city’s Southernmost
station where the horses, those drudges that lugged
the Number Sixteen to Harlem and back took respite,
a brief Sabbath when the trolley finally
stopped and buckets of fresh water were brought.
You remember what you said, right? How you yearned
to capture something quotidian as the weather
and how disconsolate you were — a sorrow alleviated
when you saw that driver in a rubber coat caring
for his team in the bitter cold, because there, at any rate,
is the human touch. It was pathetic fallacy
alright: you, the gloomy artist, stopping to use
the magic of your little black box to immortalize
your own loneliness, capturing the prayer made
when those veils of exhaustion became
visible, steam ghosting off the sour-wet backs
of the overworked. Yes, you made the story
your own as if that was all that existed
that night, because you and I both know
art is made from what is
left out as much as anything else.
*
And what’s cropped too is a truth
you surely knew, that of these horses —
how they’d have at best three years
to live before they dropped
dead on the street, and too big to lift, they’d be left
to rot until they were soft enough
to hack apart and carry off in manageable chunks.
Not pleasure horses but street nags, they were the original
American horsepower, garaged in lower
tenement flats cramped dark with rats, fueled with
cheap oats and a whipping stick. The year after
you took that photo, a hundred thousand of them
were in your city alone, a year known for
The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894, and though
the blizzard that night brought enough
white to cover all that shit, once that snow melted,
the liquefied sludge of it wicked up the hem of every
long skirt, brought on a plague of flies in spring.
And yes, even then, much was the same:
the bulk of it was shoveled from rich neighborhoods
and dumped into the streets of the poor, making their roads
into a fetid river so thick with epidemics
a state of emergency was declared, demanding
another new invention — the horseless carriage — a thing
electric and motor and — most of all — clean —
to bring you and yours into a new age.
The rest? History, of course, with the endless
firings and exhaust of these past thirteen decades
to come, but before we savor that
irony and go there, let’s not forget
those horses, Alfred, how once those cars rolled
off the assembly, those horses were
worthless, made into meat
cheap enough to use as chicken feed.
*
I tell you this because last October
my mama called to tell me it was a hundred degrees
in Kentucky, that green valley I once knew
as home. She paused, said, Baby, funniest thing.
I was out there on my porch, having my coffee as usual,
and well, I couldn’t hear a thing, by which she meant
the birds, how in the freakish heat this autumn
they had nothing more to say.
I tell you this because when she asked
what I thought, I made up some lie
about a head start on migration, because damned
if I was going to tell a woman about to spend
eight hours on her feet the fact that
even our insects are dying out now.
I tell you this because you’d be shocked
to see what’s become of the weather — what was once
an old-folks, fine-how-you exchange, a tipping-hat pleasantry,
is now twenty-four-hour, storm-team channel,
whole seasons renamed
tornado and hurricane, mudslides and fires wiping out
entire towns in hours, and nobody in their right mind
trusts the stack of almanacs gathering
dust at the hardware store.
You’d also be floored to see cameras
common as kerchiefs once were, and just yesterday,
my mama texted me a photo when she took the kids
to a pumpkin patch and touched the first horse she’d seen
in years. In the shot, she’s pressed her palm to the dappled
muzzle, and leaning into the fence, you can tell she’s breathing in
all the sweet green rising from that barn, breathing the velvety
warmth of that beast, and if you look close, you can almost see
the dim light of another small prayer, the one she placed
on that mare’s face. I tell you this because
her photo, too, was taken at a terminal, but it’s no
station, no place to rest. No, Alfred, think incurable,
an ash-colored tumor choking out the lungs, each breath
taking in less oxygen, the blood fizzling with
carbon. Better yet, think of your passenger pigeons, your bison,
of those horses — there were so many of them they were once
a nuisance, an endless supply, and now? Well, what are left
only make a special appearance — a treat, like that single horse
with no work to do except
pony-ride the kiddos in circles and stitch
my exhausted mother
back to herself. I tell you because what’s cut
from the image she sent me is, you know, still the same:
everything to come and everything
past. I’ve stared at it the way I stared
at yours, tricked by how a single click stops time,
desperate to know how a camera can do that and still do
nothing to stop what is to come. For that,
I give her photo the same title
as yours, because both mark their own
separate beginnings to this same end.
Ø Ø Ø
This poem was originally commissioned by the Poetry Center at Smith College for the book The Map of Every Lilac Leaf: Poets Respond to the Smith College Museum of Art.