Blog About Photography

I didn’t get to Anti­etam on this par­tic­u­lar tour of Civil War related land­marks, but this poem by San­dra Beasley posted on smut to-​​go kind of cap­tures the expe­ri­ence of vis­it­ing some of these places, dis­tant from us in both miles and time. If most peo­ple take in a Civil War bat­tle­field at all, I think they prob­a­bly do it on a school field trip with­out feel­ing much of a con­nec­tion to what they’re see­ing. This cap­tures that expe­ri­ence as well.

Anti­etam
by San­dra Beasley

We all went in a yel­low school bus,
on a Tues­day. We sang the whole way up.
We tried to pic­ture the bod­ies stacked three deep
on either side of that zigzag fence.
We tried to pic­ture 23,000 of any­thing.
It wasn’t that pretty. The dirt smelled like cats.
Nobody knew who the stat­ues were. Where was
Stonewall Jack­son? We wanted Stonewall on his horse.
The old can­nons were puny. We asked about fire­works.
Our guide said that some­times, the land still let go
of frag­ments from the war — a gold but­ton, a bul­let,
a tooth migrat­ing to the sur­face. We searched around.
On the way back to the bus, a boy tripped me and I fell—
skid­ding hard along the ground, gravel lodg­ing
in the skin of my palms. I cried the whole way home.
After a week, the rocks were gone.
My mother said our bod­ies could digest any­thing,
but that’s a lie. Some­times, at night, I feel
the bat­tle­field mov­ing inside of me.

Bill Poplack, 1982

My Grand­fa­ther, William J. Poplack, died yes­ter­day at around 4:45 in the after­noon. He was incred­i­bly car­ing and gen­er­ous human being, and, at 88, he’d lost absolutely none of the wit that made him so much fun to spend time with. Grandpa stayed with us through more than 10 years of his declin­ing health  he was also a fighter with an iron will. He sur­vived a Nazi P.O.W. camp after his plane was shot down over occu­pied Hol­land dur­ing World War II, and then, forty years later, bested a gun­shot to the heart dur­ing a mug­ging right here in New York City. When his time finally came, he was sur­rounded by fam­ily in Birm­ing­ham, MI, the place he lived all his life. Every one who knew him and was close to him will cer­tainly miss him very much.

© Greg Wasserstrom

The other night I was on the sub­way with a bunch of my friends, we were on our way to the Ange­lika to see Perse­po­lis (Incred­i­ble, by the way. See it!). The train was packed so we were crammed in and I was stand­ing above a cou­ple, prob­a­bly in their late fifties, the man was wear­ing a heavy wool pon­cho. The woman had a dig­i­tal cam­era and took a pic­ture of the man, then they hud­dled together to look at the lit­tle screen. They laughed. The man said, “You can air­brush that out.” I thought to myself that that was pretty quaint that he still says air­brush, but then he cor­rected him­self. “Pho­to­shop it. You can Pho­to­shop it.”

He said the words like he was han­dling a some novel new gad­get. And then he repeated the them, only this time with a melody. He sang the them, like this:

“PHO-​​TO SHOP IT,” four syl­la­bles, four notes: F, F, E, D flat.

Pho­to­shop didn’t have a jin­gle — until now.

The cold comes with weight.
Huge bur­dens of thought, rife with
triviality.

—–

Now light comes early.
A jar­ring reminder of
so much wasted time.

—–

Leaf­less and gnarled,
they make ref­er­ence to what,
these icons of guilt?