READ A POEM
by Angie Estes
Photograph
Even large historical portraits assumed to have
been painted from life are often found to have a
photograph, rather than a blank surface, beneath
the paint.
—David Featherstone, Untitled 50
What is loss compared
to the memory of my thumbnail
across your cheek, stretched like the tail
of a comet on its way
out of night; who loved
Mona Lisa more than the one
who wiped the smile on her face
with a knife?
Underneath every painting
lies a photograph of what we can keep
out of all that we’ve been: it is flat
and perfect and wants only
to be thin,
but always we remember
something we think we still might see
and move straight in to touch it, nodding
as we tap its tight skin.
This is the only portrait we have
of love when it ends—a hundred paw prints tracking
over moonlit windowpanes, you looking out
of a photograph across a bleached
terrain, waiting for the terraced
whorls at some finger’s end
to etch the glassy surface
of your eyes.
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“Photograph” by Angie Estes, from
The Uses of Passion. Gibbs Smith, Publisher, 1995. Used by permission of the author.
ABOUT TODAY’S POET
Angie Estes is the author of five books, most recently
Enchantée (Oberlin College Press, 2013), winner of the 2015 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize. Her previous book,
Tryst (Oberlin, 2009), was selected as one of two finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Her second book,
Voice-Over (Oberlin, 2002), won the 2001
FIELD Poetry Prize and was awarded the 2001 Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her first book,
The Uses of Passion (1995), was the winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize.
WRITE A POEM
Occasional poems mark an event.
Write an occasional poem on one of this year’s anniversaries. Here are just a few: the 200
th anniversary of the birth of Henry David Thoreau, the 125
th anniversary of Sherlock Holmes’s debut, the 80
th for canned Spam, the 50
th of the first heart transplant, and the 30
th for
The Simpsons TV show.