Photography

	Your eye must see a composition or an expression 
	that life itself offers you, and you must know with 
	intuition when to click the camera.
	       – Henri Cartier-Bresson

The images I plan to collect
are free. Let’s go, you said,
when told that never
had I walked on a frozen lake.

I’m still waiting on the trip—
like boiling milk jailed
by sheets of fractured glass;
I hear the edges you can

test with boot, judge with ear
to the ice. In a lake-less state 
back east that rarely drops low
for long, my mother kept us

within a chain-linked frame.
Three youths stalking perimeters,
wielding tree branch machine guns.
That image is just as clear

as this you I see: both shuttered
in time. The words I plan
to collect are free. Speak them
whenever you like. The days

to collect are also free, though
I’m not sure I’ve enough
to afford them. I spent it all
accepting what I believed

at the time was a gift. Tonight
during record colds, I’ll wait
for the sound of tires climbing
my snow-slick drive, an engine

idling and your voice, tinny
and eager—I’m here, 
you’ll say, to make good
on every promise. The secret

of photography is that images
are found and not created.
You only need four sides
and a flash. But what masters

never tell is how sometimes
you must wait for what seems
forever—before the boy lifts
his arms above the horizon,

before the woman in your viewfinder
steps into a perfect square of light.

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