Elinor Ann Walker
—
Self-Portrait as Triptych
after Untitled (Self-Portraits), ambrotypes by Sally Mann (American, 2006-2012), originally exhibited in Upon Reflection, Edwynn Houk Gallery, 2012.
1.
That dark blot beneath cheek-
bone suggests a face that can’t
contain itself: artifact of wet plate
processing, what’s left
uncovered by collodion,
or how bruised flesh collapses
toward spangled galaxies,
births stars, where I am
following as if you are
constellation.
2.
At the edges of your eyes, light
leaks, makes you drift
elsewhere: here, lines
intersect as if latitude,
longitude are certain; debris
on the plate, matter
on the glass, creates
scratches, crepe of neck,
years mirrored, evaporated,
distilled.
3.
You fell. An accident.
How one side fractures
countenance, lists off
plumb, blurs: underexposed
in solution, silver salts. I tilt
my head, see myself, witness
your defiant chin, how it lifts
this luminous image reversed
from a negative on
glass.
Note: for more on ambrotype photography and process, see here. Mann turned to these self-portraits that “allude to pain, aging, and disintegration” (Sally Mann, Getty Museum) after a serious fall from a horse left her somewhat immobile. Mann’s own Triptych (2004) may be seen via the Getty link.
Mapping
A red dirt road led to my grandfather’s pond—or to the top of the dovetailed dresser in my childhood bedroom, strange landscape where I kept the only arrowhead I’ve ever found, its chiseled edges so different from the buckeye I saved for luck, smooth like my river stones—all these hard things knocking against each other in a turtle shell, scraped clean, that my grandfather gave me when I didn’t understand its emptiness meant death, or that the turkey tail feather he gave me, which I pretended was a quill, inked and storied with genetic code, was a lonely banded plume, tales long over, now stripped of bird where nests littered dust, where eggshell fragments (robin-blue) and mica shimmered next to the pink jewelry box filled with buttons, its tinny notes and plastic, spinning ballerina alien to me because I was more at home among the stranded and scavenged.
After my father died, I found my baby teeth swathed in a handkerchief in his chest of drawers like tiny pearls. In late fall, dry leaves would cover the clay-hard road so thickly that wind rustled a whisper buried in that hollowed-out terrain like a ghost. I don’t even know if the pond is still there where I first learned to send a stone
skimming
as lightly as a feather over water.
Elinor Ann Walker (she/her/hers) is the author of Fugitive but Gorgeous, winner of the 2024 Sheila-Na-Gig First Chap Prize (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), and Give Sorrow (Whittle Micro-Press), both forthcoming. Recent and forthcoming poems appear in AGNI, Bayou Magazine, Bracken, Nimrod, Orca, Plant-Human Quarterly, Plume, Poet Lore, The Southern Review, Terrain, and elsewhere. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, lives in the Appalachian foothills, and is on the poetry staff at River Heron Review. Find her online: elinorannwalker.com
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