petalridge.com
the website of
Derek Kannemeyer
PIC LIT
The Flap Over Tree Debris Island
Click to read Derek's photography and poetry book The Flap Over Tree Debris Island. This is the complete and unedited PDF version. For the tradebook, contact Derek at PING ME.
Excerpts from ZOOM LENS, 2017
My first DSLR: a Panasonic that became my travel camera, and that I eventually learned how to use. My first attempts at Pic Lit. The photos I chose, much as they pleased me then, now often strike me as shoddy. Sally's, which I sometimes borrowed, were a bit better. But here, for old times' sake, are three pieces from the sequence pairing my words with my very own images.
1. Dragonfly, Petal Ridge
We loll our days away by the lake, gawking at lotus blossoms, at the hawks, turtles, and herons, at the skitter and glint of dragonflies.
See this one, planting the flag of itself atop a pickerel weed, wings hoist about it like a Dracula cape? Or like a pearl diver’s arms, held ready over a mirror-inch of water. Blown large, you see it for the predator its prey sees, monstrous and rapacious.
Or to my eyes, monstrous and beautiful. Like that posse of youths on a quarry wall we saw once, bare-limbed, bare-chested in the sun, dive bombing, 1-2-3-4, about a trio of giggly girls. Such sleek cocky predators, they are. Such stillness and flit, such flash and iridescence.
See this one: how the wings lift their shimmer over the colorlessness of the lake. Admire the spider web traceries; the dark notch at the rim that is called the stigma. Like a ritual bad boy marking—a scar’s slash, a swoosh of gang ink—to say, You have been warned.
It balances atop its petal ridge, watching. I steady my camera's weight. I narrow my eye.
2. Stick Warrior
Out of the tops of dead trees strides a stick warrior. He's in silhouette, his face less than profile, but it's a beast's face. Leonine, perhaps? And he's helmeted, unless that sprout of horns is his own: a bull's face? He wields a spear curved at the hilt, its shaft burred with rags of viscera; he lunges it at the sky…
I had looked up, hearing the hawk cry out, but instead, spied him; quickly, for proof, I took this picture. But rather than vanishing, he froze, transfixed—transmogrified somehow into wood.
Until I moved a few steps off, into an altered perspective—where, turning, I found him gone.
At a fascist rally today in Charlottesville, a Nazi from Ohio will rev his Dodge Challenger at the crowd. My friend among the counter marchers will report another car on 4th St, making multiple passes at them, how they must bolt and dive. The President will release a blistering, or blustering condemnation, nimbly not taking sides. Oh, the battles that have raged, that we still wage, we stick people. Not knowing our gods from devils, and impugning both; slipping off into the trees.
Is it time, yet, to unnumb from the spell, my countrymen? To let branches be limbs, and dead wood, steel?
3. Goldfinches, Echinacea Flowers
"Are you homeless?" asks the black woman in the bright yellow pantsuit. Actually, I don't understand what she's asking—she's inside her parked car with a window down, calling out across her teenage daughter in the passenger seat.
"Am I homely?" I ask back. That would be true enough: I'm forty years and forty pounds past my prime; I'm shuffling along in my baggiest cords, hauling a recently hobbled leg. But she gestures instead at my grocery bag. "Are you homeless? Because I see a lot of homeless people out on the streets, carrying their grocery bags, and I give them food, you know?"
"Oh. Well, no, I'm not homeless. I'm headed to that grocery store on the corner there. But I do appreciate," I say, endeavoring to mean it, "the thought."
The next day, I've told my workshop group the tale. I'm fretting about my apparent decrepitude. "You should have worked it!" they reply instead. "Asked if she had a vidalia onion! Some fresh arugula!" Well, fine. I give them a chuckle. I sip my buttermint tea.
Out in our hostess's garden, goldfinches are bopping about the echinacea flowers like they're little trampolines. They whistle as I shamble by to my car. One even poses for a photo op, giving me the eye and waggling. Such a handsome fellow! as if to sing. Not you, oh not you! but I am!
T'ai Chi With The Finches: Summer Palace, June 1992
For a moment, the two of them seem as alike as birds.
Less in their features—for the people of this great lurch forward—
with their tides of bicycles, and the low surf
of their first motor vehicles, and their high, wide surge of cranes—
are as distinguishable to an American eye as any humans—
it's more in the way they come at us.
In white shirts, dark slacks, the standard garb;
simultaneously bobbing their brass brown heads;
as each swings at the same slight angle, lightly away from him,
like careful groceries, two bamboo cages.
Soon, the pair will pick out a patch of ground.
The finches, dangled from a branch, will tune in their pleasant radio.
The men, with an immensely contained belligerence,
will bow, spin, breathe, and smite the air.
All week, we've seen them at their t'ai chi:
The people of this city—of throng, and thrust, and busyness—
as they rinse, for an hour of grace, their lives of fret.
Mao had the sparrows who ravaged the crops
drummed up from the bushes, into the sky, and slain.
Once they lay dead in their millions, it transpired
that what the birds had actually gorged on
was the insects that ravaged the crops.
They're the number one national pet now, these finches.
And here they are, singsonging away again,
without recrimination or alarm, as the shadow jousters of Beijing
tilt, and carve their slices
out of the barely polluted air.
poem & photo originally published in Stone Bridge Café
For a gallery of 1992 photographs taken in China with a DSLR borrowed from my father, see PHOTOGRAPHY. For a long prose piece (written at the time), a few more pic lit poems, and some other assorted bits and pieces from this project, see PERIPATETICS, housed at the POTPOURRI tab.
Three Poems from "Visit China '92: Happy Friendship Propitious"
(the keystone essay is filed under PERIPATETICS)
a color version of this image is posted in PHOTOGRAPHY, in the China '92 gallery
Watermelon Vendor, Beijing, June 1992
An hour past dawn,
and yet she sleeps on,
on display to all
who pass by her stall.
There’s a bicycle wheeled
as a front flap, to shield
her body from touch.
It doesn’t seem much.
Her bed's the stall's counter.
Below and around her
she has tucked and has sealed
the wealth of her field.
In a cot (see it?) laid
in some side canvas shade,
a treasure much sweeter—
a small child—her daughter—
a slate at her feet
walling her from the street—
wakes; watching me
frame my shot till I see.
Watermelon! Watermelon!
the chalk says they’re selling—
so cheap at the price!
May their sleep restore them
for what breaks before them.
May the cost suffice.
Streetmaster, Suzhou, June 1992
It had been work, and useful work, they told us,
for the old men. The way an elderly American
might walk folks’ dogs or bag their groceries,
here, an old soldier, say, might stand
flag in hand, like this man, at a crossroads,
such as this one, directing its stop and go.
Mostly of carts and bicycles, then, naturally;
and still, in old, slow cities like Suzhou:
we saw none of his kind in Beijing or Shanghai.
He’s the fellow in sandals and blue silks,
garb of a good Mao peasant, holding a flag outthrust
(so the crook of his elbow tells us) from somewhere
about his heart. When I give the signal, comrades,
I imagine him grousing, launch yourselves
at that yellow-skirted missy paying me no heed.
Except that this is the new China, now.
The whole crowd but him is in good shoes,
white shorts, tan slacks, for this, now, is the land
of the slick, of the great hustle forward.
Still, they will honor the streetmaster’s flag, please.
They will remember on whose backs they built it.