‘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.