It began with the first baby, the house <br />disappearing threshold by threshold, rooms <br /> <br />milky above the floor only her heel, <br />the ball of her foot perceived. The one thing real <br /> <br />was the crying; it had a low ceiling <br />she ducked beneath—but unscalable walls. <br /> <br />Then she found with the second child <br />a safer room in the camera obscura, handheld, <br /> <br />her eye to them a petaled aperture, <br />her voice inside the darkcloth muffled <br /> <br />as when they first learned it. Here, too, she steadied, <br />stilled them in black and white, grayscaled the beestung <br /> <br />eye, the urine-wet bedsheet, vomit, pox, <br />pout, fever, measles, stitches fresh-black, <br /> <br />bloody nose—the expected shared mishap <br />and redundant disease. In the evenings <br /> <br />while they slept, she developed the day's film <br />or printed in the quiet darkroom, their images <br /> <br />under the enlarger, awash in the stopbath, <br />or hanging from the line to dry. Sometimes <br /> <br />she manipulated their nakedness, blonde hair <br />and bodies dodged whiter in a mountain stream <br /> <br />she burned dark, thick as crude oil or tar. The children's <br />expressions fixed in remedial reversals, <br /> <br />she sleeved and catalogued them, her desire, <br />after all, not so different from any other mother's.<br /><br />Claudia Emerson<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/photographer-2/
