Seeing Sally Mann: A Progression

   Photographer Sally Mann near Lexington, Virginia  (Erinn Springer for the NYT)
Please click photo to enlarge.

We stood in long silence

Facing her bravery

The nameless abstractions

Quirks of an antique process

Her first way of seeing

Then the avalanche

A photograph is two things:

What it says to the world

And what it says to you

We've built too close to the river

The next flood will take us as well

–– With extractions from a Walker Mimms interview

with the photographer Sally Mann, published

in the New York Times, September, 2025.

Primitive

Edited from the public domain

 

Trapped in the time loop          

as the numbers turn over          

kneeling to the flame          

Living in the Wind

Path to the woodpile                  jo'b   

A cold and angry wind

passes through the country,

shaking this old farmhouse,

its posts and beams creaking,

its mortices and tenons

pushing against each other,

giving a little to keep from falling.

Late, I read the news and tend the fire

to keep my bones from chilling,

all night I let the faucet drip

to keep the pipes from bursting—

the wind is a passing thing,

passing through a passing thing,

which is my life. I am old.

I go slowly to grow older.

I pull down my cap and turn my collar up,

heading for the woodpile through the drifting snow,

each step a crunching underfoot, less of a sound

in my head than a vibration in my soul.

I lean into the wind, sometimes

turning sideways in the stronger gusts,

giving a little, still standing.

Else

from "As We Wait" (Andrea Modica)

                                                            Each other

                                                            Is all we ever have

                                                            And too much to expect

                                                            Love and death

                                                            Love and death

                                                            What else?

                                                            The snowflake

                                                            The sunlight

                                                            The music

                                                            Make do

                                                            6-7

December Ever Since

jo'b

        

Awakened by the wind,

louder than the music

that keeps the dreams away,

another clipper moving in

just as I had made my peace

with the bare places again,

the nothing that is not there

and the nothing that is.

—with lines from Wallace Stevens' The Snowman

Solidago Artifex

jo'b

Closer to the ground

with each cold night

moving slowly

through the ruins

the falling bones

where we had sighed

and squinted at the sun

looking up through goldenrod

waiting for our miracle to come

Spiral

jo'b

We need each other               

in the expanding night               

the soundless flight               

of the owl               

and the flame               

the parade of the dead               

catch my hand as we pass               

perne in a gyre                              

unafraid               

               

at the end               

to call it love               

December Moon

jo'b

Moon of the long arc          

Teach us the strength of silence          

Certain and tidal          

A Winter Heart

Click to enlarge.                              jo'b

I would speak my drifting heart,

But something's in the way,

A caution in the spinning wind,

Something's in the way,

December's moon, its long, high arc,

Something tidal in its wake,

Reticence my saving grace,

Yet something's in the way.