‘Silver Gelatin Prints (an Exhibit)’ & ‘Santorini’
Photographer - Chase Bradburn
Silver Gelatin Prints (an Exhibit)
The light invited me between the birch trees
A vigilant Moon
Consuming many prints in his white light
The bones, the dogwood blossoms,
The ladder pulled up to the roof of the Taos pueblo
So no one can climb to the entrance
Chilis rustling like windchimes
The tension of high crags and the shadowy lag
Of light on the sensitive page
A piano forte of storm clouds
Fighting over Half Dome
Cali sands falling from hands
Aspen spending its gold in autumn’s hold
A red filter to fill in the sky
Slopes relying on the white snow
To juxtapose imposing landscapes
Mountainous clouds draped in loud brightness
So the rest of the world seems dark
I am a cloud burned in under light filament
I am a slope poked and prodded in footsteps
I am a silver aspen asking to be seen in the forest
The photograph made by hands so dazzled in a moment
It becomes an art before it ever forms a memory
A man plays piano as the stop bath impedes further change
A fire smolders in a boy’s dream, the cliffside Cali house
Doused long ago
A tripod rests against a yew tree as a valley waiting for the slant of shadows
As the meadow mewls for the mule deer to part the tall grass
I pass the time winding my fingers in the weather
The optic eye my wife, while I lie waiting
For Moonrise
Santorini
The eruption of Thera—heard 3,000 miles away—changed the face of the island from Sun to
Moon.
Solar Island,
You trembled, and
The Great Sea wrapped over you
Loving you with lunar liturgies,
Illuminating the phases of patience
In your crescent resilience
Cliffside vigils still shiver
Reverent to who you were
Seven monk stars observe
A sustainable silence
Cobalt exalted crosses
Gloss religion over the architecture
The volcano textures the beaches
In fracture rapture
Chalk-white pumices collect dew
Spreading it to grape vines, twisted
And guarded against the heat of their origin
Again the mule transports a savior—
In the form of freshwater—
Hoisting life up 300 steps
Again the sea blankets
Quivering shores
Again Rooster boasts its anointed voice
So the clergy of palms calmly fan
Arched houses
The Three Sisters twist their ringing song
Brass tongues beckoning
One and all
Then night descends and
The lunar island extends the olive branch
To the sea, strumming the waves in lullaby
One day will Thera break her pact of peace
Urging the Great Sea to claim Moon, too,
And call herself savior?
Corrie Thompson is a poet and photographer from the suburbs outside Chicago. Her writing appears in Eclectica Magazine, Mantis, In Parentheses, Poet’s Choice, Good Life Literary Journal, Haiku Journal, and Flash Fiction Magazine. She would love to become a birch tree in her next life and be one with the natural world she loves so much. Her instagram is @mis.underwood.
