From Elizabeth Alexander's "Lottery Tickets," grieving for her husband.

    "When we first became lovers, we entered a three-day, three-night vortex.  Night One I slept Senghor's "deep Negro sleep" for what seemed like the first time ever, lifelong insomniac no more.  Night Two I burned with high fever and dreamed of my grandmother and a cherry tree, the only fruit she ever ate to excess.  The next morning, Ficre gave me small sips of cold blackcurrant juice and rosehip tea to make me well.  Night Three my fever broke and so did my menses, more blood than I had ever let in all my life, all over the bed, a trail across the room, the bathroom floor, and in the tub.  He cleaned it up; I did not feel abashed.  Then he had to go to Washington... The last thing he put in his bag was my first book of poems..." 


    "....Death sits in the comfortable chair in the corner of my new bedroom, smoking a cigarette.  It is a he, sinuous and sleek, wearing a felt-brimmed hat.  He is there when I wake in the middle of the night, sitting quietly, his smoke a visible curl in the New York lights that come in between the venetian-blind slats. 

     At first, I am startled to see him.  He sits so near, is so at home.  But he doesn't move toward me, he simple cohabits.  And so, eventually, I return to sleep.  He isn't going anywhere, but he isn't going to take me, either.  In the morning the chair is empty."


"....I dream we are moving, my family of four: Lizzy, Ficre, Solomon and Simon.  It is light and easy... Now it is just the two of us walking a long, gently curved road, holding hands.  At a fork in the road, Ficre lets me hand go and waves me on.  You have to keep walking, Lizzy, he says.  I know it is the only truth, so I walk.

     I look back.  I look back.  I can still see him, smiling and waving me on.

    ..I walk.  I can always see him.  His size does not change as I move forward: he is five feet nine and a half, exactly right.  I can still feel the feel of my hand in his hand as I walk.

     I wake and the room is flooded with pale-yellow light."

From "The Long Exposure of Francesca Woodman", by Elizabeth Gumport

"In order to avoid making her suicide the climax of the film, which would mean once again presenting it as central to her life and work, Willis frames Woodman’s story with that of her parents. The Woodmans begins and ends with Betty and George discussing their own work, in particular a sculpture Betty was commissioned to produce for the American Embassy in Beijing, and whose progress Willis tracks throughout the film. Its installation is at once triumphant and bittersweet. The elder Woodmans often feel their reputations depend on their daughter’s—as if, as Betty puts it, “she’s the famous artist and we’re the famous artist’s family.” George recalls that Woodman killed herself a few days before the opening of his own Guggenheim show.

The Woodmans dispenses with the image some may have of the young photographer as a tortured naif, whose suffering was uncorrupted by ambition or the desire to do anything besides disappear. 
Francesca cultivated her reputation and knew, as her friend Betsy Berne wrote, “how to play the game.” Having artists for parents, one friend informs Willis, made success seem imperative, and obscurity particularly painful. It was necessary, she told her father, to make at least one career-related phone call every day. The process of creating a coherent public image is explored in her journal, where she often referred to herself in the third person. In one 1975 entry, she mentions having shown the journal to a friend. “Does it,” she writes, “read as a book one wonders.”

Woodman’s interest in self-presentation—and self-preservation—emerges even in a note written around the time of her first suicide attempt. “I finally managed,” she explains, “to try to do away with myself, as neatly and concisely as possible…. I would rather die young leaving various accomplishments, some work, my friendship with you, and some other artifacts intact, instead of pell-mell erasing all of these delicate things.” Woodman reverses the traditional terms of the arrangement: death, like photography, is simply a series of chemical reactions. Living is “erasing”; dying a way of ensuring that what was will continue to be, of fixing certain things in place. When Woodman died, she left behind an unpublished artist’s book, a set of five images, called Portrait of a Reputation.

"


"...Woodman reveals the injuries that occur in the time it takes to produce a single picture: hair turns wispy, flesh fades and stretches into smoke. The longer her shutter stays open, the blurrier and more transparent bodies will appear, until at last they disappear. Shortly before her death, she began experimenting with a particularly long development process that required her to spend several hours producing a single photograph. In the end, her camera captures not the girl but the long moment it looked at her."

The Woodmans is showing at Film Forum in New York through February 1.

Snow Landscape, in a Glass Globe  - by Jean Valentine

A thumb's-length landscape: Snow, on a hill
in China.  I turn the glass ball over in my hand, 
and watch the snow
blow around the Chinese woman, 
calm at her work,
carrying her heavy yoke
uphill, towards the distant house.
Looking out through the thick glass ball
she would see the lines of my hand,
unearthly winter trees, unmoving, behind the snow...

No more elders.
The Boston snow grays and softens
the streets where you were...
Trees older than you, alive.

The snow is over and the sky is light.
Pale, pale blue distance...
Is there an east? A west? A river?
There, can we live right?

I look back in through the glass.  You,
in China, I can talk to you.
The snow has settled; but it's cold
there, where you are.

What are you carrying?
For the sake of what? through such hard wind
and light.

               -And you look out to me,
and you say, "Only the same as everyone; your breath,
your words, move with mine,
under and over this glass; we who were born
and lived on the living earth."

My lovely sister Julia found this, and it's haunted me since.


Sweetness- by Stephen Dunn

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear   
   one more friend   
waking with a tumor, one more maniac   

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness   
   has come   
and changed nothing in the world   

except the way I stumbled through it,   
   for a while lost   
in the ignorance of loving   

someone or something, the world shrunk   
   to mouth-size,   
hand-size, and never seeming small.   

I acknowledge there is no sweetness   
   that doesn’t leave a stain,   
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet ....   

Tonight a friend called to say his lover   
   was killed in a car   
he was driving. His voice was low   

and guttural, he repeated what he needed   
   to repeat, and I repeated   
the one or two words we have for such grief   

until we were speaking only in tones.   
   Often a sweetness comes   
as if on loan, stays just long enough   

to make sense of what it means to be alive,   
   then returns to its dark   
source. As for me, I don’t care   

where it’s been, or what bitter road   
   it’s traveled   
to come so far, to taste so good.

Counting the Beats- by Robert Graves

You, love, and I,
(He whispers) you and I,
And if no more than only you and I
What care you or I ?Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.

Cloudless day,
Night, and a cloudless day,
Yet the huge storm will burst upon their heads one day
From a bitter sky.

Where shall we be,
(She whispers) where shall we be,
When death strikes home, O where then shall we be
Who were you and I ?

Not there but here,
(He whispers) only here,
As we are, here, together, now and here,
Always you and I.

Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.

-Robert Graves