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IN LOCKDOWN, LOOKING THROUGH FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS

Emma Aylor

Many I collected for their light. If there are men, they are incidental: I’m not here to see them, I am here to watch one woman through a few minutes, a few photographs April ’57 to April ’58. She and her date on a creekbank in the scrub, on a rock in the James River, never together (someone had to hold the camera). In one diptych each poses in spring formal —gloves and corsage, tie and pocket square— on the Blue Ridge Parkway, a curve in the road I know. Her skirt is cut by a slight lean of the flash from a car gone by. Her polaroid mottles, artifacts globed over her head, and I found all these together on a trip back to Virginia, at the estate sale shop, $5. I can’t imagine her having a name. I have a tiny one of a woman called Milly posed in tall grass. Her name’s right at the top, in ink; her exposure is high, but she smiles out under hair like you’d look uphill at someone you love but haven’t told everything. This is a marvelous place— postcard from Los Angeles, 1952— a marvelous place you could keep warm here melting as background into which some half-kept figures’ legs, skirts , shoes , hands shadow at faces the camera never quite could get on the special paper even the leaves in the colorless sky dissolve

 

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I wrote this poem living alone in early rain in Seattle. It's an attempt to talk through why I'm drawn to some snapshots—those that are expressive, those that obscure expression, what is continuous, what disjoints, the sense of certain strangers—in a cedar box of old photos and postcards I keep.