I stopped taking pictures on trips when I realized I could remember very little except what I took pictures of. But on our honeymoon in Rome in 2000, I had a couple of disposable cameras left over from our wedding. I took pictures of ragtop Fiat 500s:
Ape trucks:
And motorscooters with roofs, which I saw for the first time that trip:
But when I got pregnant in 2006, I figured I’d better get a camera. In Rome last fall, mostly I took pictures of Maisie. Here she is at Gregory Corso’s grave.
It seemed depressing that the poet who wrote the anthology piece “Marriage” would have such a crap-awful poem on his grave. I think Maisie restores a bit of the original insouciance.
There’s a Danish or Norwegian poet named Piotr or Dag or something buried in this cemetery as well—it’s the Protestant Cemetary—and Percy Bysse Shelley’s ashes—but not his heart, which is elsewhere—are also here. So is Antonio Gramsci:
And of course Keats:
My second favorite photo from Rome, though, after the one of Maisie sitting on Gregory Corso, is this one, one of my few attempts at documentary artsy-ness:
Divieto D’Affisione means Post No Bills; literally, Divieto means Prohibited. Prohibited to Vote for Berlusconi! I like the little Hammer and Sickle. We were seeing an awful lot of right-wing graffiti on that trip; this little bit of vandalism lifted our spirits.
But other than taking pictures of Maisie, I tend not to take pictures. I walk around Philly noticing things which would make great pictures, if only I had my camera with me, if only I knew how to frame a shot. Like the baby doll strapped into a doll stroller and knocked face down and abandoned in Palumbo Playground one wintry night last week. It seemed like the coldest, darkest thing I ever saw, given as I am to the pathetic fallacy. Or on Salter St. around the corner from me, the tiny public swimming pool, chained up and up for sale. The pool is drained. A broken Empress tree bows its branches and empty seed-pods down into the deep end. An Empress tree is gorgeous in bloom; not in bloom or dead like this one, it looks like garbage, as the ladies in my neighborhood would say. On the far wall, in loopy spray-painted letters,
NO RUNNING
DIVING
HORSEPLAY
The sign on the gate says the pool will not open this season. It has said that for at least five seasons now.
That would make a good picture, by somebody who knows what to do with visuals. So would the baby doll. William Carlos Williams would know what to do with these too; he’d make a poem that looked easy, though he’d labor and labor and labor over the lines. There’d be some sort of action or movement in it—there almost always is in a Williams poem, however brief—and there’d be some sort of hint of the presence of the looker-on, because the act of perceiving to Williams is usually as important as the thing perceived.
I could take the pictures, I guess. I could just click the button a few times and see what would happen. At least they wouldn’t be blurry. My camera has an anti-shake device. I wish there were an anti-shake device for poems.
Epitath desicratis!