Bob Elmendorf lives and writes in Maiden Bridge, New York.

The Photographer
By Bob Elmendorf

At the end of December you shudder
through the forest hungry for light
on your pools and rapids
silvered with mercury, slough frost
to tint a scale one wind from ice.
Pewter ewers no sideboard has contained
fill whose greens have gone to grey.
You stop at bends, stilled by a pool,
late-afternoon the unbroken winter clouds
into blue slide shows, silver-chest their oddities.
You are my treasury, I can’t skewer
light, pin it dripping from the tray,
trashed cumulus pocketed in whirlpools,
a stratus dunked in ripples. Darkroom swindler,
you heist the joints of clouds to marble
your meanders, click away, it’s just past
winter and the diluted sun can still
unfilm your icing pools to be caught
there, a welcome intruder.