on not taking photos

Three weeks and one day. That's how long I've been in Vermont, and here's the crazy part: I haven't taken a single photo. Not one. Okay, maybe one that I snapped with my useless cell phone on the very first afternoon, once I had puffed my way up the mountain hill to the state college that sits above the studio center, but aside from that and the photos I took in Montreal, nothing.

Part of it is the rain, of course. It has rained every single day. It starts hazy, and then the rain falls. Then the sun comes out for just long enough for me to run back to my room (which is teal, and pink, and sort of makes my eyes bleed, and I am glad to use it only for sleeping), and I put on flip-flops and grab my sunglasses, and then the sun goes away and it is gray and overcast, and then the sky opens and it pours rain, and my feet slide in my wet flip-flops. I change my clothes all the time here. I live in my fleece, because I can pull up the hood when it rains, and I switch back and forth between my two pairs of jeans so that one can sort-of-not-really dry out in my humid and teal bedroom while I wear the other.

But this is not about the weather, or my clothes. It's about the photographs I am not taking. I will take some this week, I know. But I didn't expect this non-Nikoning to feel so liberating. A lot of us here feel this way: we are stepping out from behind the viewfinder. We are not documenting anything. We just are.

I'm percolating a longer Vermont post. There will be much more to say--later. In the meantime, here is a poem from the brand-new manuscript (!) I have put together on my studio floor, which is currently titled Dear Stupid (!!). It sounds like a sad poem, and maybe it is, but I am happy in Vermont. Right now, I am filled with bacon and my legs ache from pogo-ing to Weezer at our third dance party.

It's a good ache.

*

IN THE PHOTOGRAPH I DID NOT TAKE THAT NIGHT

ten of us sat in a circle.
It was early August, hot

for Michigan. Friends
were visiting, seeing

those I had replaced
them with. Chicken,

avocados, queso fresco
I drove across town

to find. People picked
up and set down

brown bottles. Trees
filtered the last daylight

with perfect art direction.
Every bone murmured

get up, go inside, record
this, but that summer

I was trying to be
conscious in a moment

instead documenting
my own life, someone

standing just outside
the frame. That night,

I felt good. I had walked
through the earlier fires

of the past year;
I had fallen in and out

with total strangers.
I lived and died

in my many minor,
first-world tragedies.

I wanted the picture
as proof that life

spools on, burying
its own mistakes.

Ahead of me lay
even more, I know

that now. I continued
to turn into a cliché.

Later, I would think
of that night and marvel

at its ignorance, weep
for my ego. I thought

the worst was over.
It was not. It was the photo

I had waited for all my life,
and I did not move.