i.
When I took the first trip without my parents,
my mother gave me her camera, showed me F-stops,
taught me the basics of aperture.
The first photo I took was the Flatirons.
How much care I put into that single still.
(Film was physical then, a limited resource.)
ii.
I think of fire in the heights,
how it can roar downslope through valleys,
how in my shots from last summer, smoke hovers like mist
on mountains burning in the evening sun.
So much else in my life was burning then.
iii.
Snow in Boulder.
I’m not there, but I know how I’d frame the shot.
I’d get really close, snap on the macro lens.
It’s not about what is quintessential
but what may not have been seen
from quite the same vantage before—
the crystal of the snowflake on stone,
how fragile the rock is, how fractured.
iv.
This is a different setting.
Decades have passed, more and more
people who once stood outside that photograph
are pressed towards the ground.
Through the window of my aunt’s condo,
sun can flame the painted glass at the far door.
Sometimes, I imagine coming back to the spot,
finding, however difficult, the frame
of a picture taken decades ago,
the impossibility that I might
see again the same thing.
—
The creative work of M. Frost has appeared in Strange Horizons, Star*Line, Sow’s Ear, The Hopkins Review, Camas, and many other venues, including a chapbook publication, Cow Poetry, from Finishing Line Press.
