The pretty photographer
The pretty photographer smells of vervain.
She washes her knit top in vervain soap
and dries it laid out on a small towel
on the white painted wooden floorboards
in front of the double doors
that lead to a tiny balcony
where no one ever goes.
Once, her brother stood out there
and when he leaned over the iron railings
she saw them begin to bend
and she said nothing,
and when he came back inside
still smoking his cigarette she said
nothing about the rust stain striped across
his oatmeal coloured V-neck jersey.
This is where the photographer is now:
outside the zoo, taking photographs
of people’s bags, and what
they are carrying in their hands.
The pretty photographer says nothing
in interviews or artist statements
about the people’s bags, their hands,
the things they carry.
She talks instead about the importance
of shadows to the composition,
and the problem of the colour
of the shadow often clashing
with the colour of the object in the sun—
a third colour must be found
to act, she says, as a go-between.
And then she laughs, a curl of hair
slipping down across her face.
The pretty photographer on Guy Fawkes night
The pretty photographer sits alone in an empty office, eating toast
she toasted in the kitchenette. She had been invited
to a friend’s party and so went out, dressed in a gold dress
with a pattern of birds on it—not very well aligned
with the seams, as it happens, so that the head of one bird
is cut off at the waist, and another bird is folded quite in two.
At the party there would be champagne, probably, and
tiny, lovely things to eat, but she had driven
past the street where the party was happening
till she found herself parking outside the office building
where her friend Leonie works and to which
she has a swipe card (and the password to Leonie’s computer
though she has not turned it on), and now she finds herself surprised
at how lonely it feels to be watching the same fireworks
she knows her friends are watching without her at the party.
The loneliness is in fact far more spectacular than the fireworks, so
after a while she turns her back to the window and, to the sound
of the fireworks exploding, begins photographing
the little bits of untidiness she finds in Leonie’s office,
the dust between the numbers on the phone, the crumbs
along the side of the cushion of Leonie’s chair, wires
tangled on the floor, a shoebox on a pile of folders, smears
of something oily on the computer keyboard, feeling
oddly nervous every time her camera flash goes off.
Anna Jackson
Anna Jackson lives in Island Bay and lectures at Victoria University. Her most recent collection of poetry is Thicket, published by AUP in 2011, but watch out for I, Clodia, which will be released in November.