Well my good intentions of writing a poem a day for April have already gone awry as I missed out on yesterday. I’ll resume my good intentions and post two today. In the spirit of all my posts on ‘Heckle’ I will continue to post a poem and an accompanying image. The poem will respond to the image in some way. All these poems are first or early drafts.

Today’s poems are written as a result of going to a wonderful exhibition recently of the photographs of American photographer, Ansel Adams, at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich.Adams’s photographs are of vast landscapes but especially of water, and sky, and clouds.and are imbued with emotional resonance.

This is the photograph which advertises the exhibition and here is my first poem in response.

1.
The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park

This is the Snake River winding through the Teton Mountains.
The photograph he made from those materials:
that length of shine, those corrugated peaks with accompanying snow
and casual clouds kept aloft by the viewfinder.
We’re looking down at his mind, his imagination
in freefall turning from ice to water to vapour
and back again, its perpetual whirling cycle.

2. Equivalents

He wrote to Alfred Stieglitz
about his pictures of the sky:
those ‘Songs’, he said,
teach me how to show
the equivalent
of what I see and feel,
no more can I say in words,
these photographs
must stand or fall
as silent evidence
of such equivalence.