Tuesday poem #35 : Maxine Chernoff : Camera

You exit camera’s gaze,
through the aperture,
politics unknown,
motives shrouded in leaves,
certain as any tomb.
Without limit or attitude
luster is mechanical,
grows reasons
melting in summer’s heat.
Hope is a vessel of
longitude’s practice,
lengthening space
as glasses toast
skin’s translucence
in a photo you took
when the story found
its way home to
   the mind
of its choosing.
A dreamed equation
suffices for essence,
being stretched over
a candle’s swift burning.
Grief is a body of water
spreading like fire
  in the branches
of a landscape painted
  and patiently framed.

Maxine Chernoff is the author of 14 books of poems.  Her latest, Here, will be published by Counterpath in early 2014.  She chairs the Dept of Creative Writing at SFSU and has co-edited New American Writing since 1986.  She is a 2013 NEA Fellow in Poetry and the 2009 winner with Paul Hoover of the PEN USA Translation Award for her work on the Selected Poems of Friedrich Hoelderlin  (Omnidawn, 2008).  In January of 2013, she was Visiting International Scholar at Exeter.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan