Lyn Sperry
Lyn Sperry has published in Old Crow, Larcom Review, and Rumble Fish Quarterly, which nominated her for a Pushcart Prize for her poem “Marrakech– 1998.” She lives in Vermont with her husband and two obstreperous dogs.
Through the Lens
For a year we rambled in a van you rehabbed.
Six months in we walked in the Black Hills,
camped in a goldenrod meadow stolen from the Sioux.
In dreams I flew like a crow over Lakota stones.
You took pictures of chokecherry, ponderosa pine,
cottonwood like textured loss.
Soon after we hiked in the Badlands.
The hills of rock and earth,
pink-tinged striations. You snapped, captured
the hills’ winds from within, phantom
deerskin fringe whipping with the desperation
of the Ghost Dance.
Next to us the girls in a convertible flicked their trash
on the ground. In your photo, I grip with one hand
the top of their door, hold the trash up
to throw in their laps.
In a voodoo shop in New Orleans, I had my palm read
by a red-haired psychic. She took hold of my hand,
turned it over tenderly, smoothed my palm. I began to cry
and she listened to my story of itinerant loneliness.
She promised happiness and good fortune.
Navajo Nation, New Mexico, ten months in:
an empty hogan singing its song of desert solitaire.
You photographed me through the east-facing door.
You focused on one eye and eyebrow.
“Can’t you take a photo where I look happy?” I asked.
“But you don’t,” you said.
In a truckstop, eleven months in, a pockmarked prostitute
looked hard into your lens. Her long-fingered
hands rose to shield her face from the camera flash.
She said, “Another twenty and you can take more
pictures.” You reached in your pocket and unfolded the bill.
She turned to me. “Girl, what are you doing here?”
Back at the van I climbed onto its roof.
The stars were upstaged by the parking lot lights.
In the blue night, the Peterbilts and Kenworths,
the shuffling people, the glowing red diner, and our van,
especially our van, looked like shit.
We landed back home. It took us a month to break up.
Your photographs live on, painful markers in time.
When all else seems fine, I crave them.
