Photograph

She wants a picture, but
when we meet she
flees. I clutch at air, at
bone or shadow and flare of light.
Heart's rattle, eye crease, pink
acrylic streak. Dust motes at
the window.  She slips into 
a sunlit draft. Stillness. The shutter
clatters. Don't look.  How then
can I--?       Shots 
frame the afternoon. At
lunch her slender finger taps
the knife edge (gesture not
pressure please understand).
Sometimes I'd like to 
[finger tapping].       O
don't. Blood pools another
letter, another sort of
shutter.

Notes
We're packing today for a summer on the boat. Tomorrow, early, we fly to British Columbia. Soon we'll be headed for Alaska. Here, in Nova Scotia, it is pouring rain. The ceiling leaks again.  Where to find a poem in all the stacks and piles of clothing, packets of dried peppers, oil filters, piles of sketchbooks and rolls of brushes? (Now that I write the list, I see a poem might be found there. Tomorrow perhaps.)  I recalled a poem I'd drafted in April two years ago, while on the boat in Mexico, but never completed, about a portrait commission with a reluctant subject. Or perhaps I was a too hesitant photographer; I didn't know how to draw her out. This is that poem, recomposed and completed from my notes of 23 April 2011. Sometimes those old journals and sketchbooks are pretty handy. (Quick, copy this one, before you leave it behind!)

Photos are of coltsfoot blooming from dead leaves (the first flower, if you can call it that) and broken bits of wharf and barn in West Quoddy and Beaver Harbour.