Spirit

Variously sized trees line the corner outside Rite Aid.
A girl tells her son they are “hugging together” there and he looks.
They are wrapped tightly in a plastic net. Both are tuned
to the frequency of strangers' conversations and to the possibility
of remaining among trees.

Grilled hatches open from the ground at regular intervals
while avenues extend from a structure at the city center.
In outlying territories there is a softening of grade.
Expectations are troubled and dissipate.
Travel becomes less difficult.

In the street, circles of attention and imagination intersect.
The girl becomes a wooden shape, her family contained
inside the heaved motion caused by a storm.
In a world that holds the moment of its inspiration
she explains, “It is a kind of weather unique to this place.”

The Photographer

A tour of the horizon begins at 2770 meters, chalet-hotel, and continues through valleys, where absence creates depth, each peak marked by a small black arrow. From a tower, a number of sheep, each in relation to each other, pulling the landscape into balance. Through this picture I see another picture: body crouched and tense dragging the desert for light, extracting rigorous form. In the mountains, an animal wakes, snow melting from its back. The moment is recorded in a book in sketches, notes, and light, primary matter of the document. Chalet-hotel at 2770 meters. The animal is an ox. The animal is a black goat with a broken leg carried on a boy’s back. Two heads move evenly across the frame. Light freezes on the banks of the river, a fragment of the expedition which, over time, becomes detached from the real. “Sometimes you get it wrong.” Here in the body where vision meets the world becoming object. Through this picture I see another picture: crouched and tight, caught in the shuttered language of the image. Obstinate way in which the photographer reveals.

Sasha Watson is a writer, translator, and teacher based in New York. Her poetry, translations, and reviews have appeared in Bird Dog, Common Knowledge, Triquarterly, Bookslut, Nerve, and the Poetry Project Newsletter. She is currently working on a Ph.D. in French literature at NYU.